22/10/2012

Thank you for loving Skye Edge

“Thank you for loving Skye Edge and providing us with an outlet to tell our stories.” Cast Member.

Theatre is weird. A whole bunch of people work really hard for ages to create something to be experienced by a group of people for a short period, then it’s over.  There is no physical immortality for a live performance; nobody is going to come across our show in a second-hand book store, a bargain DVD bin, or on a DJ’s playlist.  Like people, a performance gestates, is born, lives, and then is no more.

Big Sky was hard to define. The performers; two poets and six locals, most of whom had never read in public, tell in beautiful verse of a tin of sweets in a shed, a pigeon with snow on it’s head, a lightbulb full of rain, an Elephant Hawk Moth Catepillar, a football made of paper and sellotape. And what do these amount to? A place, as remembered by the people who live there.

Watching it for the first time, (the last time we staged it, I had to read the ‘young boy’ parts, and it turns out that when I attempt to sound like a seven year old Sheffield lad I sound like a Geordie on helium), I saw real people, vibrant and with a glint of mischief in their eye, telling their stories, amongst snatches of beautiful singing, and a rousing guitar number. And when it ends, the cast, the audience, friends, neighbours, family, strangers, mix over tea and bakewell tarts. Grandmothers emerge as local heroes and their granddaughters rush to be photographed holding a plastic pigeon.

Finally, when they are all gone, the mugs washed, the bunting taken down, the lights turned off. Where has it gone, this thing we did? This event, Big Sky, joins the sweets, pigeon, lightbulb, catepillar, football, in the collective memories of the people of Skye Edge. And for those of us who were guests here, Skye Edge will live with us through the Big Sky event.  And so, although the room is empty, the performance is not gone, just changed, into another state of being.