Excavate has been producing memorable projects exploring the histories, identities, tensions and cultures of communities across the East Midlands and beyond since the year 2000. We work in places and spaces that are often extremely challenging, but we know that where a story is told is as important as the way in which it is told.
It all began in 1997 when Julian Hanby and Andy Barrett were part of a small team working with a youth group to stage an alien invasion of Bilsthorpe, a mining village in the north of Nottinghamshire. Having created utter bewilderment amongst the audience, who were lead around the village which became a very weird place for the night, they decided that creating site-specific theatre and working with local communities was the thing to do.
Originally known as Hanby and Barrett the company developed a reputation for creating visually spectacular shows that aimed to surprise the audience in the manner in which they were staged.; and which involved as many people in the community as possible in the making and production of these. They were also largely heritage based; exploring stories from the past to create collaborative and collective experiences which we hoped would somehow help communities move forward into the future (and many activities have been initiated as a result of the work we have started). We absolutely believed in the ethos of community theatre, yet also that the work that we made should have production values that equalled those in professional theatre; and we think there are times when we achieved that.
Over time we became more and more ambitious. The Takeover in Oakham imagined the town and county being run by a private company – put out to tender – and enabled us to tackle the social and environmental issues that really mattered to the community: house prices, supermarkets, farming, tourism and identity. The Girl In The Woods with Broxtowe Borough Council (an early supporter and commissioner of our work) allowed us to inhabit the woods at Halloween and to bring a 1930′s manor house back to life, complete with butlers, cooks, servants and musicians. The Festival of The Beck produced four full scale community plays in four neighbouring villages in four consecutive weekends.
In 2008 we began a relationship with the University of Nottingham that lead to a three year residency in Bilborough during which time we were able to reflect more on our practice and produce a range of work, culminating in The Future Is Now! which opened the new secondary school, was watched by over seven hundred people, and is still perhaps the most ambitious thing (in terms of narrative) that we’ve ever attempted. Since then our relationship with academic institutions has continued to grow, and we have been part of many research projects where there has been a need to engage with the community, or for material gathered through research projects to be shared in potent ways with a wider public.
We were lucky that for these years we were in a funding climate that allowed for large scale community plays, that would usually only be staged two or three times, to be produced; and were able to also find support from the heritage sector which has continued to play a key part in our survival. And as time went on our work found other ways to use the material that we gathered from our research to ensure as wide and diverse an audience as possible; creating films, websites, books, exhibitions, and research outputs.
In 2014 the company became Excavate as we sought to formalise our company structure (becoming a CIC). We thought long and hard what to call ourselves and chose Excavate because that is what we try to do. To unearth stories that shape, define, and which divide or bind communities together; and by working in and with communities to champion their uniqueness, celebrate their identities, and investigate their pasts as they move into the future.
Around this time Julian Hanby left the company and after continuing with larger scale community plays our work began to shift, partly in response to the new funding climate but also building on our academic research work (and now using our community engagement activities as a research tool in itself, creating new forms of knowledge). We were commissioned by a number of Creative People and Places projects, developing a new team of collaborators that produced smaller scale touring work, exploring different narrative forms, which aimed to dig into more specific challenges that communities were facing. A brief moment of collaboration with the National Theatre, where it seemed we would bring the idea of the community play back into the national consciousness, was thwarted just at the moment we found ourselves working in India on a community play in a Pune basti. A subsequent project in India was in full swing when the pandemic struck.
Like many companies we found our work having to adapt, and this meant the development of our audio practice. Sherwood Voices was created through and beyond the pandemic, again working with large amounts of community members to create storytelling that digs into heritage, culture, and place. This has continued, including making work for the N.H.S., and although it lacks the energy of live performance, we know it has the potential to be experienced by a much larger audience over a much longer timeframe.
And so our work continues. We are lucky that by having managed to keep working, even if there have been some fallow moments (although not many), that we have become part of an international network of community arts companies. We have been regular contributors to the International Community Arts Festival since 2011 and are absolutely committed to the ethos and values of participatory community storytelling, in whatever form it takes. This has meant that alongside our commitment to the idea of the large scale community play that we have increasingly worked on smaller projects, with discrete groups telling stories that have often been hidden. Yet narrative and formal experimentation is still central to our work; in making the stories that are told as effective and affective as they can be. From our very beginnings we said that we wanted to make sure that those who took part, or who turned up to watch what we had been making, would talk about it for months or years to come. That is still our aim.
As we move forward we will continue to make community storytelling work of all shapes and sizes. And we will collaborate with a wider range of artists and researchers who we think will excite the communities that they develop work with, and will take the quality of what we have been doing to a new level. Over the next years we hope to develop projects with friends and fellow travellers across the globe, and to find new and imaginative ways for people to share their stories with others whose experiences may appear very different and yet be surprisingly similar.