The Gathering - Questions for the Coming Year

By Rachel Grunwald

The Commonwork Trust and Improbable share the transformative aim of inspiring people to connect. To each other, to the Earth, to meaning and agency in our lives, to new possibilities, and to our shared future. 

For the past two years we’ve been exploring what it means to do those things together, at a new home for Improbable in the beautiful Bore Place in Kent - in a project called ‘The Gathering’. What happens when you bring the theatre to the countryside and invite nature into the theatre, far far away from cities and venues and commerce? 

We’ve hosted dozens of artists onsite to learn about Improbable’s world-leading practice of improvisation and spend weeks reconnecting with nature. We heard from them that it was life-changing. We’ve piloted a successful intergenerational theatre club with the nearby community. We’ve taught an ArtsAward programme to local schools. We’ve caught strains of opera floating on the breeze from the Large Barn in the early morning. 

We’ve shared space, lunches and coffee breaks, and decided to start the redevelopment with the Oast House. We’ve identified storage and scratched our heads over where Improbable could fit their desks in the meanwhile, and where and how we could put up an artistic ‘meanwhile’ space for rehearsals and workshops whilst we plan and raise money for our eventual space on the site of the Brickworks. 

And all along we’re asking the big questions: 

What will it mean to have a home here? Who will it be for? 

What does it mean to feel at home? How can we be at home, together? 

What does it mean to belong to an artistic community here? 

What needs to change? What needs to stay the same? 

And alongside these, we’re asking the practical questions, no less big or important. The solutions to these will form the stepping stones for our next few years together: 

How can we create those spaces, physical and non-physical, that will host creative gathering and connection on the Bore Place site? 

What would you like to see in our Host House? How would it be useful to you? How can you help us get there?

What, if anything, do you know about building temporary spaces? Or fitting new things into a busy farm and education site? 

How can we use these spaces to help more people feel they belong in nature, and to engage with the Bore Place mission? 

How can we use these spaces to help more people feel they belong in the artistic community, and engage with Improbable’s practice?

Please join us to explore all these questions at our Open Space event at Bore Place on 19th and 20th January 2024. Maybe you have solutions. Hopefully you have questions of your own…

About Improbable

Improbable is a theatre company that has been creating innovative live work for more than two decades, playing a major part in creating and defining the vocabulary of contemporary British theatre.

We’ve been using OST in our own creative process for over a decade, as well as holding an ongoing programme of large- and small-scale Open Space events for the theatre and arts community, under the banner of Devoted and Disgruntled.

Through OST we work directly with communities, creating spaces that enable people to address and take collective action on the issues that matter most to them. We have a long track record of providing Open Space events to a range of clients, helping these large and complex institutions to have better conversations with themselves, and to find more efficient solutions to company-wide problems.