The Gathering: ’Tis The Season…

Lee Simpson, 2022

It is cold today. Frosty. My daughter (a big fan of glitter) was impressed by how the leaves on the ground sparkled silver in the light this morning. For the first time this winter it looks like winter out the window. Like how it’s meant to look, according to the Christmas cards.

Meanwhile, inside, I am planning an Improbable workshop for January, at our new home-to-be, Bore Place, in Kent. I’ve planned a fair number of workshops in my time - had to write the blurb, think about the marketing, the funding, the space, access - all those things. I’ve never before had to consider the risk of flooding. Or how dark it will be. But when discussing the new theatre games group we want to run there, as part of our growing relationship with the site, that’s what was flagged to us - 4.30pm in January? It’ll be pitch black, and there might be flooding on the roads – couldn’t it wait till spring?

Before I go any further with this story, I should put a caveat in here: the Bore Place team hold activities and welcome visitors all year round – outdoor nature play, gardening clubs and more. The question was raised only because our group is a brand new venture, and it might make most sense to start a new thing in the spring…

Well, yes, maybe…

Well, yes, maybe, but…

But I am keen to get going.

But I hope to pilot the sessions in winter, so we can launch the group in April.

But I’m going to have my two kids at home in January, and at least part of my motivation for starting the group is that I want them to be able to go to it.

But it feels like an important seed of an idea - Kristin who will be running the group with me and who has been helping to contribute some Improbable-ness to Bore Place’s existing education offer in their Arts Awards programme - even wrote it into our publicity:

“Improbable are a company of improvisers, theatre-makers and facilitators who are hoping to make our home at Bore Place. This group is one of the seedlings we’re planting as part of this new partnership. Come and help us make it grow!”

The metaphor is a familiar one. So familiar I barely noticed it when Kristin sent me the draft of the blurb. But since we are now using the seed-as-idea, project-as-plant metaphor to talk about running a workshop on a site shared with some actual vegetables, and a lot of cows, perhaps it is time I took note of the origins of the imagery. Perhaps it is time to ask whether January, when the light and the temperatures are low, when the rains may be heavy, is in fact the best time to plant something?

We’ve been talking - in the snatches of time between this year’s relentless series of applications to be written, zoom meetings to be had, emails to be sent, Open Space events to be held, designs to be completed, rehearsals to be entered, shows to be staged - in between all of that, we have been talking at Improbable about moving our work towards ‘a seasonal model.’ That’s seasonal as opposed to industrial. A model that is cyclical and allows for times of rest, or even inactivity, as opposed to a constantly productive, always industrious way of working. Sounds good. But what does it really mean? And can we actually do it? We’ve been saying for years that we need to do less, slow down, draw breath, leave more space between projects - I haven’t noticed much space happening. If anything the work has only increased, as the stages have got bigger, and the productions more ambitious, and the funding applications more complex, and the transport faster, and the technology more sophisticated, enabling us to meet and message at any time of the day, week or year. And all the while we can buy strawberries, and other summer fruits, at the supermarkets, even in December. I don’t know when the planting happens but the growing and the harvesting is year round, as is the producing, the shopping, the consuming.

But we know all this. We keep saying it. I’ve even just written a novel about it. A novel I thought was about mothers and daughters - a feminist rewrite of the Persephone myth - but has ended up being titled No Season but the Summer and is also about the climate crisis and the breakdown of our oldest of stories and rhythms, which still form the ground of so much of our thinking and dreaming - like how a new idea is a seed of something, that could grow, blossom, and come to fruition.

It is cold today but we know the temperature is rising. ‘We’ being Improbable, and also the bigger ‘We,’ the purveyors of a capitalist western economy and culture of relentless productivity - keep saying we must stop. And we keep not stopping. Not changing. What will it take? What will it take to halt us in our tracks at last?

Something drastic, I think. Something unquestionable. Something like a whole lot of dark. A wide stretch of water. A flooded road in January perhaps? Though that might be the least of it.

Improbable have committed to moving out of London. We were doing it anyway, committing to it anyway, but then as it happens the Arts Council’s ‘NPO-T’ programme came along, designed to encourage a cultural shift away from the capital, and so we signed up. ’T’ stands for ’Transfer’ out of town, though my daughter maintains that T is for Tree, and that a ‘transfer’ is a kind of temporary tattoo which you hold against your arm and dab with water to make the picture switch onto your skin. She is right, of course. If we are going to move it needs to be more than skin deep, more than a new postcode that we stick onto our name. We need to change, not just transfer, to do something we have never done before - locate ourselves in a landscape, grow roots, make T stand for Tree.

It is scary. Change always is, even when you are longing for it. But I think, as we enter a new season of our lives - an autumnal one, we ain’t spring chickens anymore - we are ready to take it seriously at last, to find out what it might be like to work with a sense of seasonality. It will mean saying ‘no’ more often, which is not easy for a group of people who have spent their professional lives saying, and even teaching, ‘Yes, and….’ - the game of acceptance which lies at the heart of Impro. But it is time to say a different, maybe a deeper kind of ‘Yes.’ It makes me think of that famous passage from Ecclesiastes:

There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under heaven…
a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot…
a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them….

I think it is time for us, slowly, to gather some stones, and make a shelter - both grand and humble - for the work we have done through all the previous seasons of our lives. Somewhere we can run some workshops. Somewhere we can be at home. Somewhere we can plant new things, when the right season comes around.

 As I write this, Phelim is on retreat in Brighton. It was my birthday present to him back in August - a week on his own by the sea in December. Both he and I struggle with holidays. All that fun, all that pressure to relax and have a good time. We have young, intense children and stopping doesn’t come easily to us. But I like the idea of a retreat. Of taking rest and slowness seriously enough to give it the status that we accord our work. For it to be a profoundly necessary part of the work itself.

So I am now grateful for the challenge our Bore Place collaborators presented: a new workshop? In mid-January? Really? It’s exactly why we need to move and what we need to learn. It reminds me of the year when I lived on a boat (back when I was a spring chicken), and how I relished the way the seasons couldn’t be ignored, because the basics - heat, light, shelter, food - involved effort on my part. More than the flick of a switch. The winter wasn’t a pretty picture out the window. It was inside - in my fingers as I lit the stove, in the thin, brittle splinters of ice that slid under the door from the deck. Put Improbable into a rural landscape and we will have to change.

How this translates into the shape of our calendar, how it starts to impact on the work - not only the when, but the how and the what - is still unknown. But I think it’s exciting. Something for us to dream about as the nights grow longer, and the sun reaches its midwinter still point. ’Tis the season to be jolly, but maybe also to journey, inward, homeward. Mary and Joseph had to travel, so that story goes, care of donkey, back to the home of their ancestors because the authorities in their time said that T stood for Taxation. And then, in the dead of night, in the cold, in a shelter that had definitely had no risk assessment done on it, surrounded by cows - a new life came. Maybe some things can begin in winter.

So, we are actually going to go ahead with the workshop in January, at Bore Place. You are invited. It’s open to anyone, 6 or 60, whatever season of life you find yourself in. We’d love to see you there. It won’t be held in the stables, but you might pass the cows on your way to it. But - one thing - maybe bring your wellies and a torch.

N.B. And if you don’t have either, or are a wheelchair user, or have any other access needs, please let us know so we can support you to join us too.

You can also come along to another workshop, of a kind, that we will be holding at Kent University in January - our annual Devoted and Disgruntled event. D&D is about as close as we have come as a company, in the last fifteen years, to working in a seasonal way - it has been our one fixed point of the year. A ritual, a gathering, a question, to which we return again as a new year starts. It is an event that has its own cycle or rhythm scored into it: a time to dream, plant, grow, tend, reap, and then to rest, replete - all these, folded into one day. We hope you can join us, by train, car, shank’s pony, or donkey: come and tell us what ’T’ means to you, what seeds you have rattling in your bag, what landscapes - inner and outer, rural or urban - you are transferring towards, rooting yourself within.

With love, and Season’s greetings,

Matilda and the rest of the Improbable team.