Three Days at Gateshead International Festival of Theatre

GIFT, Gateshead International Festival of Theatre, ran from 3 to 5 May 2013. It was the festival’s third year, and by then it had grown, in founder and director Kate Craddock’s own words, from something that had seemed impossible into a genuinely international event, with artists arriving from across the UK, Europe and further afield. I was commissioned to document the weekend. The film moves through the range of work on offer that year: dance pieces, more conventionally theatrical work, long durational performances, and interventions in places you would not normally expect to find performance at all, including Gateshead Interchange metro station and upstairs in The Central Bar.

Presents: Site-Specific Work Across the Town

A strand called Presents, which had begun the year before, continued in 2013: small, site-specific commissions responding directly to Gateshead itself rather than staged in a conventional venue. One of the more striking pieces I filmed used a building scheduled for demolition as a surface for projection, made by Trinity Session, a company from South Africa. Kate Craddock described the aim as giving audiences new ways of interacting with their own landscape and location, rather than asking them to come to a theatre and sit down. That year the festival was also funded by the German Charitable Foundation to run a series of professional development workshops for artists, alongside the performances themselves.

An International Festival, Fully Gateshead

Several of the people I filmed talked about what made GIFT distinct. Brian Lobel, a performance artist who has since become Professor of Theatre and Performance at Rose Bruford College, put it like this:

“What’s nice about the festival is that it provides a moment of contact between people at various stages of their careers, works that are at various different stages. When you see a lot of people together, this kind of insane, awesome, beautiful mishmash of people and styles and things becomes really, really inspiring and reinvigorating for me as a performer.”

Alan Lyddiard, theatre and film director and former Artistic Director of Northern Stage, was more direct about where he thought the festival was heading:

“In 20 years’ time, Gateshead International Festival of Theatre will be the biggest festival in the North East. It will be full of major international players coming here and wanting to perform here, and that will be because they started something really beautiful right from the beginning.”

Filming a Festival Built on Conversation

Kate Craddock talked about the festival breaking down the idea of a closed theatre community and opening it up to the wider public, and that came through clearly in the filming itself. Nobody I approached across the three days treated the camera as an intrusion. People were mid conversation, mid rehearsal, mid pint, and mostly happy to keep talking. Filming a festival like GIFT means working fast and staying light: no fixed schedule of set-piece interviews, more a matter of being in the right pub, or the right metro station, at the right moment, and trusting that the conversations worth capturing would happen anyway. Details on the full festival programme, past and present, are on the GIFT festival website.

I later brought the same fast, close-to-the-work approach to a promotional film for Greyscale Theatre: Filming Theatre: Gods Are Fallen and All Safety Gone.