John McGrath is giving a workshop called Secret Languages at this week's Ignite Festival in Auckland. In Manchester John is the Artistic Director/Chief Executive of Contact Theatre, a cutting edge community-based multi-disciplinary performance venue.John McGrath is giving a workshop called Secret Languages at this week's Ignite Festival in Auckland. In Manchester John is the Artistic Director/Chief Executive of Contact Theatre, a cutting edge community-based multi-disciplinary performance venue.It aims to support the youth of the city with a target group between 13 & 30. With a strong commitment to cultural diversity they host a huge programme including many top British performers and fostering the raw talent of the local community. In Manchester there are many subcultures including communities of African, Carribean, Pakistani, Indian, Chinese, European as well as a large student population. There are 4 Universities in Manchester. John McGrath describes Manchester as a very vibrant community in a very ugly city. It has the largest student population of any city in Europe and is the locus of the British music scene as well as supporting a thriving club culture.

I asked him what made Contact Theatre so special?

John McGrath: Contact Theatre began as a local repertory theatre group in the 70s during which it became a solid community presence. However in the 90s it was becoming more and more evident that it was out of step with the community and the whole operation required a total rethink. This also coincided with the government having some surplus lotteries funds that they used to bolster arts organisations throughout the UK. At that time Contact started to evolve into what it has become today. We turned everything on its head by bypassing the usual programming dilemmas such as "What shall we do and how will we get the community in here to support it" to the more proactive, "Let's get the community in and let's work to find the creative solutions to create a cutting edge venue by fostering an open communication strategy."

Once a month we hold a forum called Action Contact and everyone in the community comes along, the finance manager, the cleaner, and anyone who has been along to at least one performance can attend and we workshop the organisation and how it is working. People are very committed to this forum and it effectively fuels the ongoing evolution of the programme.

There are three levels of activity that we support: the cutting edge of new work by established artists, emerging work and participatory performance.

We offer 3 home residencies annually in the Contact at Home programme a year for emerging artists to develop their ideas and that culminates in a showing around June which is always fascinating. At the moment we have a Poet and two performance artists working at Contact. We also love having international visitors and I think it's a great place to come and visit for any artist.

In terms of the local community we foster projects with particular communities. We've just done one with some local refugees. We also hold a biannual international Festival called Contacting the World. The next one of these in 2004 is going to have participants from 6 different Islamic countries to try and create more dialogue there.

What's exciting now is that we manage to do things in a very edgy and unpredictable way. And the standards are always lifting. We've had some really big names now come through and perform or workshop with our community.

Like who?

John McGrath: Well we have had Will Power the Hip Hop Theatre Artist whose brilliant and came and worked with us, The Builders Association from New York and Victoria from Belgium a fantastic performance company. We've also had ongoing associations with Arena Theatre in Australia.

Do you see the future of theatre to be much more working in the interface between physical mediums such as dance and contact improvisation etc rather than away from a scripted text-based point of origin?

Yes I do absolutely. There are many languages in theatre, design, video, movement and language. Finishing on the page doesn't happen anymore. We tend to workshop our writers as much as our actors so that the process is not dominated by the literal medium.

I saw from the Ignite Programme that your Workshop is called Secret Languages?
Yeah that's right. The workshop is going to extend a new type of work practice that we have been evolving called Where We Talk It was in performance while I was in the air on my way here. The goal of this project is to invent a language. We would take a word in one language and then find its corresponding word in another language and so on. With improvisation we would build on the various nuances of meanings that different languages offer. However the process required participants to move away from naturalistic acting and much more into a physical movement-based language. We found ourselves constantly looking for places that conversations could begin with and then moving from there.

We end up creating these very long lists of words that we are literally giving new meanings to and so those participating are forming a secret language as such. Yeah so I'm looking forward to working with some local New Zealand artists to hear the sort of languages that people use here in this country.

Actually I texted back to Contact when I got here asking how the Where We Talk performance had gone and they texted back this brilliant sentence.

Fafalu yer babylons slapper nappa X

So what does that mean?
Actually I can't translate that - it's sort of rude but it means good.

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Secret Languages - John McGrath Workshop - Wednesday, April 9th
A workshop for young theatre practitioners (15-21) exploring ways to create a language out of your secret languages - a body of words to use in performance. Participants will work with John McGrath, Chief Executive and Artistic Director of Manchester's innovative Contact Theatre, a venue with a reputation for rewriting the UK rulebook on what theatre can be. Core to Contact's ethos is a huge variety of participatory work with young people - an ambitious laboratory of ideas about the art of tomorrow.
1.30-4pm Reception Lounge, Level 2, Auckland Town Hall, Free Admission, Max 20 people. Schools book through The Edge, individuals book through British Council.
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