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In Disney’s runaway new movie Encanto, a lovely ballad by the creator of the iconic musical Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda, bears the title Dos Oruguitas or Two Little Caterpillars. It tells a story of profound love, of tragic loss and an inability to break free from the stifling chrysalis of grief. For as long as humans have created art, butterflies have stood as shorthand for rebirth, and — true to form — at the end of the song, the protagonists let go of what they knew as caterpillars and doing so attain new heights, metaphorically, as butterflies.
Time-honoured as it is, the transformation that occurs during the pupation of a caterpillar into a butterfly is a perfect image for a movie forged in the lockdowns and restrictions of the COVID pandemic. For the experience of all humanity these past two years has been that of the caterpillar in the Disney song: strait-jacketed, reconfiguring, longing to re-emerge.
This is as true for us at Norwich Theatre as for anyone else. When the first lockdown was imposed in March 2020 — and our theatres, bars and restaurant were indefinitely closed — we faced fundamental questions of identity. The first was quite simply how we would survive, with almost all our means of generating income taken from us. Our fears were eventually allayed, in this regard, as our calls for support were met both by the Culture Recovery Fund and by overwhelming generosity from the people and businesses of East Anglia.
A second question was less readily answered. What was the meaning of a theatre without its theatres? However, even as we cancelled reams of shows, we witnessed a truly humbling surge of support from our audiences and friends. We came to realise that the meaning of Norwich Theatre lay not only in our venues, but more importantly in people’s hearts across East Anglia and beyond. Understanding this, we resolved to keep our mission alive — however great the challenge — to mine our creative reserves as never before to meet the needs of our audiences, our supporters, our artist partners and our many friends.
Throughout the pandemic — abiding by rapidly-shifting regulations, and carefully heeding what you, our audiences, told us would make you feel safe — we are proud to have delivered workshops, activities and performances to the community of East Anglia. At first these were held online, by post and by phone. Later, during our groundbreaking Interludes, we staged shows in a big top outdoors, with the support of many partners. Finally, with many COVID-security measures in place, we restored performances to our own venues, and welcomed you home to Norwich Theatre.
But we were not the same Norwich Theatre. Through the gruelling experience of closing our venues, cancelling our shows and re-arranging them, we had learned and we had grown. Like the proverbial caterpillar of Disney’s song, we had pupated, and used this unsought time of dormancy to re-imagine ourselves. We have emerged as something new, forged from the same community, and from the same artistic endeavour, but higher-flying, with greater social relevance and wider ambition than ever before.
The full story of the past two years at Norwich Theatre, and all that we achieved, may be found in our recently-published review What’s Past Is Prologue. The story of the community we serve is tenderly captured in The Passions of Pandemic. This is a cycle of performance poems which we commissioned from Norwich poet and NHS Emergency Department Nurse Piers Harrison-Reid, in which he writes:
our MPs in telling artists to retrain
ignore that we key-workers survived due to art
gave us ways to reflect and escape
ways to heal our weary hearts
We have long seen art as healing at Norwich Theatre, but this has been brought into the sharpest focus by COVID. During the pandemic our award-winning Creative Community Recovery Programme reached out to older adults who found themselves frightened and isolated, offering workshops in drama, dance and writing as well as creativity packs by post.
We extended this creative compassion to children too, especially those whose lives had been rendered traumatic or unstable by the pandemic. Alongside schools in Norwich, our specialist team tailored workshops encouraging children to tell their own stories — through drama and a range of creative arts — and work towards improved emotional wellbeing through self-expression.
And now we are embarking on a new season of our acclaimed Creative Matters. In the wake of the pandemic, and inspired by Piers’ words on the power of art to heal, our theme this year is Loss and Grief. A rich programme of drop-in sessions, workshops, films and performances will run across all three of our venues: Norwich Theatre Royal, Norwich Theatre Playhouse and Norwich Theatre Stage Two. Each is crafted to stimulate discussion of our individual and collective grief, and help us to move beyond it through creativity, connection and shared endeavour.
Emerging from the pandemic, at Norwich Theatre we face our future with a new resolve: to fulfil our purpose in Norwich and East Anglia with ever greater reach, relevance and resilience. With you, our friends, audiences and supporters beside us, we will target our work to have positive, uplifting impacts in people’s lives like never before. We have all had cause to reflect and question in these past two years, to weep, and to withdraw. But, just as a butterfly stirs inside its chrysalis, anxious to break free, our time has come to grow through loss and grief, to spread our wings and fly.
For, as Piers Harrison-Reid has written for Norwich Theatre:
but when the pain breaks
it throws shadows ahead
and leaves change in its wake
Creative Matters: Loss & Grief
Creative Matters: Loss and Grief at Norwich Theatre, presented in association with Rosedale Funeral Home across Norwich Theatre’s venues: Theatre Royal, Playhouse and Stage 2.