unstoppable
We caught up with Hannah Mulder, one of our associate artists, as she shared a work-in-progress of her new show Unstoppable. Hannah’s new show grew from a conversation with her husband, Robin, a systems scientist who works with concepts around complexity, living systems, and tipping points. They talked about stories around positive social tipping points — not just the terrifying climate tipping points we hear about, but the rapid, irreversible shifts toward thriving futures.
That was the starting point to make a show that would help an audience understand tipping points and feel empowered through that understanding.
How do the underlying narratives that we tell ourselves about who we are, what it is to be a human being on this living planet – how do those stories tip? How do you create positive story tipping points? That’s what I think art can do so beautifully, and theatre is an especially powerful tool in that.
Hannah Mulder
Hannah was also inspired by Rob Hopkins’ work on time travelling to positive futures and the idea that we must imagine them before we can create them. “Before the moon landings became a physical reality, it was being told in stories, there were cartoons about it, songs about it, books and novels. First imagining, then creating”, she says.
But she was aware of a challenge: “You come to the theatre wanting drama, wanting to see human beings grappling with obstacles, with difficult stuff”. So how do you make theatre about positive futures without it being “incredibly cloying or dull“?
The solution came through what Hannah calls “thrutopian” storytelling – a term coined by philosopher Rupert Read. Not just the utopias where we’ve magically achieved it all, or the dystopias where it’s all gone terribly wrong but the through line narratives – how do we move from here to there and how does that imagining impact what we choose now.
“In the unravelling, can we re-ravel something beautiful?” she asks. “Or do we let the collapse take us down? To me, that’s the fundamental question”.
Work-in-Progress
Some “Developing Your Creative Practice” Arts Council funding gave Hannah the breathing room she needed to explore, research and let ideas emerge organically, without the pressure of immediate production deadlines.
A second project grant from the Arts Council enabled her to embark on a research and development process for Unstoppable, engaging with communities as she developed the work, trialling how the show could work in both theatre and non-theatre spaces for maximum audience reach, as well as developing the writing and creative collaborations.
Co-produced by Hannah’s company, MakeShift and Fern Culture and in association with Exeter Northcott, Sterts Arts and Environmental Centre and Libraries Unlimited, the show, in development, brings multiple strands together: interactive audience games that help people understand complex systems and the science of tipping points (developed with Robin de Carteret at Systems Games), a love story between friends navigating the choice of whether to bring a child into this world, visions of multiple possible futures, and monologues from future voices thanking us for the things we’re doing now that made their thriving world possible.
“A gap exists between our intellectual grasp of what we face, and its real meaning for ourselves, for the people, creatures and places we love. This gap is where we must make art”.
Amber Massie-Blomfield producer and writer of Acts of Resistance
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