Kneehigh - Fairytale

About The Company

Kneehigh are a UK based theatre company with a local, national and international profile. For over 30 years Kneehigh have created vigorous, popular and challenging theatre and perform with the joyful anarchy that audiences have come to expect from this ground-breaking company.
Kneehigh tell stories. Based in Cornwall in breath-taking barns on the south coast the company create theatre of humanity on an epic and tiny scale. They work with an ever-changing ensemble of performers, artists, technicians, administrators, makers and musicians and are passionate about their multi-disciplined creative process.
In 2010 Kneehigh launched The Asylum, a beautiful and flexible nomadic structure, which means the company now has a venue to call home as well as being one of the leading touring theatre companies in the UK. The company have now presented three seasons in The Asylum in Cornwall, and will continue to reinvent the space and explore new locations in future years
Alongside their national and international touring and Asylum seasons, Kneehigh run their Connections programme aiming to engage creatively with communities in Cornwall and beyond through event and adventure.

http://www.kneehigh.co.uk/page/about_kneehigh.php 


How we make theatre
by Founder and Joint Artistic Director, Mike Shepherd

"I returned home to Cornwall 30 years ago to make theatre. It was a place where you could make things happen. Kneehigh started as a company making work for children and their families, but we soon found ourselves creating challenging, accessible and anarchic theatre for a diverse local and national audience.

Kneehigh builds a team for each project. The isolation of the barns, and the need to cook and keep warm provides a real and natural focus for our flights of imagination. This is not a conceit; it is a radical choice that informs all aspects of our work. Although much of our work is now co-produced with larger theatres, we always try to start the creative process at these barns, to be inspired by our environment and where we work. Both Tristan & Yseult and Cymbeline started life as outdoor shows, playing in epic but intimate spaces: Restormel Castle, The Minack, The Eden Project and Rufford Abbey. These elemental and charged spaces add a physical and vocal robustness to our performance style, which becomes further distilled when we work ‘indoors'.

Kneehigh are an ever-changing ensemble, a kind of strange family, many of whom come from, or have chosen to live in, Cornwall: the extreme South West tip of the British Isles - outsiders, left-handers - engaging with the world with a sense of community and identity. As King Mark says in Tristan & Yseult, "We don't look inland there's not much point. No, outward, outward lies the way! Inland there's little to write home about and much less to say!".

The company changes for each project, there are those who have worked together for a long time and those who have just arrived. We look to surprise each other, to take leaps in the dark but there is no given formula for making the work. If we were to have a manifesto it might include words like generosity, passion, bravery, humility, ambition, instinct and irreverence. These words have become the secret principles that guide our work.

Kneehigh is 30 years old this year. Although I could never have planned this; there has been no great plan, just dreams and aspirations - some of which I never thought would take this long to achieve! Kneehigh has survived because it has actively evolved. We have committed to our home, our craft, to each other and to change. It's a privilege to still be part of that journey."

Mike Shepherd , 2010