Tom Bailey talks about his new show, Wild Thing! the sequel to his 2019 production Vigil which explored the issue of extinction and specifically the loss of species listed on the Red List of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
Tom, what's changed since 2019 that prompted you to make another show?
The pandemic naturally ground live theatre to a halt. We lost a lot of tour dates for Vigil in 2020-2021, and alike to many theatre companies, things went on hold for two to three years. On coming back to tour Vigil, post-pandemic, we realised that the list on which it was based had doubled from 26,000 to almost 48,000 in just a few years. We were moved to make a new sequel show, based on Vigil’s DNA, to respond to this astonishing fact. Furthermore, so many things have changed, post-pandemic, in the context of global biodiversity - we’ve now got a Revenge Trump in office, AI is booming, the world is heating up and things seem to be getting worse and not better. The new show responds to the more urgent and more absurd situation with compassion, laughter and sadness.
I understand the research for this took you on an amazing journey?
There’s quite a lot of theatre industry interest in ‘green touring’ now. So I wanted to personally explore the question - can we be inspired to tour work by the way nature moves and travels? It so happened that we picked up a tour date for this show in Scandinavia, so (in short) I ended up walking and sailing for two months through Scotland and Norway, exploring the theme of tree and forest migration. But it also turned into a kind of artistic pilgrimage, I guess, for extinction. I walked with a 16-metre-long sheet with the 48,000 species currently extinct/endangered printed on it, laying this out in the landscape at various points where I walked. We wanted to find a way to make this journey fit within the fabric of the show, so it forms part of the show’s denouement - providing a theatrical space for expansion and reflection on the themes.
To put your material into a one-hour show you’re collaborating with sound artist Xavier Velastin. What has that brought to this production?
Xavier is a brilliant sound artist and creative technologist who I’ve collaborated with over a few years now. We have a good complicity in creating work, so this has brought a way more playful audio world to the show, and interactivity between body and sound. It also allows us to sink deeper into questions around immersive technology in the show - can technology play a role in helping us connect with disappearing species or vanishing nature (e.g. VR experiences), or is this a capitalist myth?
Presentations of climate material and data can be potentially dry, but you see humour as one way of delivering the message?
Climate change can generally be a boring, apocalyptic or tragic subject for many people. There is quite a lot to be hopeless about, and those messages get looped around social media to create a lot of climate anxiety. The show doesn’t lie - there is no easy way out of this mess, and we’re no experts to propose a solution. The show provides a space for meditation on the scale of extinction, with compassion and acceptance, laughter and poignancy. It’s a tragic and absurd time that we’re living through. For me, laughter is a part of finding some sort of hope, imagination or way through this mess. When I explored the IUCN Red List of extinct species, I was astonished at the number of comic species names there were - a Darth Vader Giant Pill Millipede, or a Problematic Flasher (a fish). Punning on some of these names - and the fact that I personally have no idea what these animals look like - became a gentle way into exploring a heavy topic. It starts funny but goes into a tragic place. I think that dynamic really worked for audiences in Vigil.
What would you like audiences to take away from the show?
We’re keen to take audiences to a heartspace that both looks at the sheer scale of extinction, and what species there are actually on the list. We make a mini epic out of a list of names. We want people to be moved by this, into a reflective and bittersweet state. In the words of author Donna Harraway, it’s about ‘staying with the trouble’ - and finding small points of hope through imagination, community and mindful awareness of the natural world on this planet.
Link to Tom's blog and photo essay - https://mechanimal.co.uk/project/journey-of-a-lost-hunter-gatherer/
