Actor, director, theatre-maker, mime and magician Guillaume Pigé is Artistic Director of The Point’s @HOME artists Theatre Re. The company are currently in a bubble in our Creation Space working on a very exciting preview of their new show Bluebelle, which takes place at The Point this month.
Q. What can you tell us about Bluebelle and what’s in store for audiences?
A. What’s really interesting in the case of Bluebelle is that we’re looking at parenthood and the excess of care, of love, for your child and how that comes about and how to deal with it. It can be quite stifling, an excess of care; if there’s too much love, it can feel overwhelming.
In Bluebelle that connects with old folk tales where it’s always about a journey of becoming someone and the different steps that need to be taken to get to adulthood. We’re looking from the point of view of a child but we’re also looking at what is that journey like from the point of view of the parent. If your child has just been cursed, like in Sleeping Beauty, what do you go through? I think there’s a lot of very interesting theatre material in all of this to explore.
Q. As a new parent yourself, how has that informed your creative process?
A. There are so many layers to parenthood and it keeps changing. What we are also looking at in Bluebelle is what is the right thing to do as a parent? You want your child to survive and thrive and be happy, but sometimes you find yourself doing things that further down the line might have the exact opposite effect. That’s what happens to our king and queen; they think they are doing the right thing for their child but actually it’s the wrong choice and they pay the price for it further down the line. It’s about agency, the choices we make and how we come to terms with those choices.
Q. What was Theatre Re’s experience of lockdown?
A. It's an exciting time as we’ve used lockdown – before lockdown we were touring madly – and that time to think about things like the company structure, our five year plan and so on which was really useful for us to go through everything and make choices about what we wanted to do. Now that everything is starting to open and once Bluebelle opens, we will have three shows on the road that can be booked and seen everywhere.
We have also developed a comprehensive training programme for various people, whether you are a professional performer or a teenager looking for your first performing experience. We have a whole programme that is there and working well. Whilst we are on tour, we also have our workshops with various schools and colleges, so we’re going to be making, touring and training!
Lockdown helped us to take our time when developing Bluebelle as we were able to slow down and really question is this the right project, does it make sense to look into this, and to ask, why theatre? And why live theatre? It changed the direction of our research but it helped us figure out what we were trying to do because it gave us that time. More personally I think I was just very grateful to be home and to spend some time with my family. That’s been one of the positives of the whole experience.
Q. We’re so glad to have the company in the Creation Space again. Are you happy to be back?
A. We are incredibly grateful to be working at The Point. We have been an Associate Artist since 2016 and the plan when we started was to allow us to step up, to upscale, and Bluebelle is a big show. That just would not have been possible if we could not work at The Point at a regular basis.
The size of the Creation Space and the ability to host artists and a team of that size in that space, the support we get technically from the team at The Point, all that has allowed us to upscale in terms of our ambition and depth. We are very grateful, I think it’s important to say.
Bluebelle will preview at The Point on Thursday 21 October at 7.30pm before premiering in January 2022 at the London International Mime Festival.
