In 2020 we received a commission from Green Carpet – a consortium of four outdoor arts organisations in France, Belgium and the UK – to create a project for outdoor spaces that engaged with their local communities in the making of the project. This was a wonderful opportunity for us, though little did we know that Covid and Brexit were around the corner, which would cause quite a bit of havoc.
“Whistlers is an absolute delight”
Dorothy Max Prior, Total Theatre Magazine
The project was based around a super fiction: the existence of an ancient culture of people who live in the mountainous forests of the Eastern edge of Europe. These people had become isolated from mainstream culture and developed a unique way of living, in symbiosis with birds and communicate by whistling. As many indigenous peoples in the Americas have long believed in Sasquatch or Big Foot, in our narrative, so the mountainous communities in the Caucasus and Carpathian mountains knew the Whistlers to exist but it was people us who don’t ‘see’ them. However, a chance encounter between an English anthropologist named Lynne Passerine and a group of Whistlers changed everything. After recognising that groups of Whistlers were beginning to migrate from their traditional homelands and pop up in unexpected places in Western Europe, Lynne established the Whistler Conservation Society to educate communities with newly arrived Whistler groups in their midst.
Our project – a package of workshops, presentations and the show, described as a Whistler spotting mission – was about various things: playing with what’s ‘real’ and what’s not, encouraging people to connect to nature, questions about authentic living, the issue of climate-change induced migration and the ethics of charity. We are very thankful to the partners who supported the project to run in a range of locations: La Citron Jaune, Port Saint Louis (Fr); Cirque Jules Verne, Amiens (Fr); Activate Dorset; Chassepierre Festival (Be); Festival International des Arts de Bordeaux; and Wye Valley River Festival.
Read the full review of The Whistlers show in Total Theatre
