Our work has developed far from any form of traditional narrative theatre structure, we had made images interrogating and investigating rather than telling. And for us to be able to do this within a performance context it was important for us to be comfortable with the images and the ‘world; that they sit within. We had created dancing police men and Benny Hill like chase scenes, our work was without a doubt surreal. But we had to understand for ourselves, what the work meant.   

This was achieved through a process of ‘discovery’, a journey that we all took together to understand what we had created. Our images consisted of fragments of performance writing, movements, mimicry and repetition. But the world we had created to facilitate the tale of Spencer was becoming strange and muddled with so many different elements, it became important for us to stand back and discover for our self what it all meant.

There were dancing champions and cloak and dagger murders, interrogations and questioning all rolled into one.

Tim Ingold writes on ‘learning to learn’; ‘To know things you have to grow into them, and let them grow in you, so that they become a part of who you are.’ (Ingold 2013: 1)

What Ingold suggests is a process of knowing and getting to know, a moment of committing yourself to the learning process so that it too becomes a part of you, studying and researching repetitively until you find out exactly what it is you set out to learn.

The same can be said for our commitment to the ‘World of Spencer’ we were at first admittedly apprehensive of the type of work we were creating, it was something new to us. But it was important for us to emerge ourselves in this surreal work and accept it for what it was, so that we might enable ourselves to understand what it was and what if meant (if anything at all).

What we discovered was what we knew almost from the very beginning. The characters we had created and the images we had made were derived from the story of Percival yes, but they weren’t limited just to him or his story. They were a cometary on all crime, all corrupt systems and failed investigations. This hadn’t been clear to us in the making stage, but it wasn’t until we let the work take over us, to become fully engrossed in the bazar and the surreal that we truly began to understand what the work was all about.

It allowed us to think about our work in its wider context, to integrate and investigate in our own ways to come to a collective understanding of what the work was.