Norwich Theatre’s Associate Company, Limbik Theatre, are producing Edgeland, a brand new show to be performed on Norfolk Wildlife Trusts Sweet Briar Marshes, and we cannot wait! We talked to Co-Directors Ben Samuels and Sarah Johnson to uncover the inspiration behind Edgeland, the intriguing characters you might encounter, and the unique relationship they forge with both the landscape and the local community.
Tell us a little bit about Limbik Theatre.
Ben: Absolutely. Limbik, we are a theatre company, we make performing arts work. Generally, this work is increasingly co-created with the local community where we work. It works in response to place, and it incorporates new and emerging immersive digital technologies in some way.
You do have a really new, exciting show called Edgeland coming up. Can you tell us a little bit about Edgeland?
Sarah: Edgeland will be taking place on a new nature reserve that’s run by Norfolk Wildlife Trust called Sweet Briar Marshes, which will be happening in June. It’s a natural history tour that turns into a mystery about a young woman who disappeared, a fictional young woman who disappeared on a marsh seven years ago.
It’s inspired by the flora and fauna of the marsh and also inspired by the work we did with a variety of community groups, from young people to older groups, dancers, and a migrant group that we worked with in June last year.
I’ve seen some of the pictures, and they’re fantastic. Can you describe the characters that we’re going to see?
Ben: So, as Sarah said, the show is a bit of a mystery, and it’s a mystery about a disappearance seven years earlier. And the witnesses to this mystery, to this disappearance, are, in fact, the different flora and fauna, the different plants and animals on the marsh.
We represent them both through what the audience hears in headphones and through what they see. And what they see are these sort of half-human, half-plant or half-animal characters who embody these different bits of nature on the marsh.
And because we’re going to be on the marsh as an audience member, how does that work? Do I move around it? Am I in one fixed place? How does that work?
Sarah: So everybody has headphones, they’re silent disco headphones, and it’ll be like a walk through the marsh guided by an actor who’s playing a guide.
So the group will stay together, and then we’ll stop at different points in the marsh, and little bits of performance will unfold that help tell the story. But a lot of the story will be told through the audio in the headphones.
And because the marsh is ever-changing, what is it like working with that landscape as your backdrop and set?
Ben: It’s amazing. Sarah and I always talk about how we’re both sort of outdoorsy people, and yet it took 20 years for us to make a show outdoors. So this is our second outdoor piece, and it’s lovely because you are really co-creating with that space, that place, and that environment. And you’re looking for it to become a partner in the creation of the work, not just in terms of what grows there and what lives there, but also where the natural locations that are sort of stages that emerge in the space, where are the places that contain their own kind of drama, just in how they exist, how they are.
And then, beyond that, it gets exciting because, as we said, the story is based on the different characters based on plants and animals in the marsh, and we want to meet those plants and animals via this guide. And so we are very much bound by where those things exist on the marsh. And we have our own kind of memory of it.
And then when we go there, we’re like, oh my goodness, this thing is actually much further away from this other thing than we thought it was. So we might have to actually tell this bit) of the story over here now. And how does that inform the overall shape of the piece? So, it is a big writing partner.
It’s been in collaboration with local communities across Norwich and Norfolk. How have those communities inspired your piece, and how does that work for you?
Ben: We started off by taking different community groups, everything from kids from the local primary schools all the way to dance groups, high school movement groups and dancers and a writing group from Norwich Theatre, all to the marsh. And we would run one session where we would sort of prepare them for that journey and for what they might see.
Another one when we were there, and then we would come back and do a series of creative workshops around how they might respond to what they essentially learned from a field trip to the Sweet Briar Marsh led by the Norfolk Wildlife Trust. And from all of that work, different kinds of stories began to emerge, and different sorts of themes began to emerge. It was also an opportunity for us to understand how these different age groups all responded to some of the themes that we were interested in.
The title of the piece is Edgeland, which is a term that we learned from Steve Waters at UEA and this idea of a place that sits in between the human world and the natural world or where those two worlds come together. And so that idea of where do the human world and the natural world intersect and why do we even see them as separate or how close are we, how far away are we from those places was something that we were really interested in exploring and that we explored through these workshops and we began to get a lot of different feedback from the group.
Describe the show in three words
Ben: It’s playful.
Sarah: Bold.
Ben: It’s a bit quirky.
Sarah: It’s a chance to be in nature in a new way.
You can catch Edgeland between 28 May – 15 Jun, for more information or to book visit, norwichtheatre.org or call 01603 630 000.
