Matthew Winston & Lucy Starkey in PREPPERS by Casson & Friends
Documentary meets dance in this thought provoking, uplifting and timely new duet performance.
#PREPPERSTheShow is an uplifting, hopeful and timely piece of verbatim documentary dance theatre, that asks: are we truly prepared? With real interviews from members of the UK survival and preparedness community, intercut and combined with compelling movement, this unique performance investigates how we prepare for, react during, and recover from emergencies - to reveal our resilience and humanity in times of crisis, and what we need in order to truly survive.
Are you prepared?
Share your thoughts on the performance using #PREPPERSTheShow
credits
Choreographed by Tim Casson in collaboration with the original cast
Original Cast Lucy Starkey & Mathew Winston
Additional Casts Emily Yong & Sebastien Kapps, Alice Shepperson & Tom O’Gorman
Original Music by Paul Rogerson
Artistic Director Tim Casson
Executive Producer Ian Abbott
Supported by Crewe Lyceum, DanceEast, Pavilion Dance South West, Out There Arts, Metal Peterborough, Surf The Wave, Hack Green Nuclear Bunker, 101 Outdoor Arts, The Real Survivalists, South Kesteven District Council, Hill Holt Wood, Restoke and public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.
Special Thanks to Rob, Sarita, Penny, Wendy, Henry, Jack, Duncan, Dan, Hannah, Fin, Stephen and our Metal Community, Rachael Spence, Lucy Siebert, Helen Dawson, Simon Hollingsworth, Tim van Eyken, Sarina Young, Louisa Pope, Kelsie Acton, Elizabeth Simoens, and all the Friends.
about preppers: the show
We started creating PREPPERS: The show back in 2019, and were due to premiere the finished piece in Autumn 2020 - ironically we had to stop making the show because one of the things we had been researching actually happened!
This show is ‘verbatim’ - which means that all the text you hear in the show, whether in the soundtrack or spoken by the performers is real - this includes:
Interviews with:
Psychologists
Academics
Local & National Emergency Planners
People who live remotely
Self confessed ‘Preppers’
and people who told us they don’t feel prepared at all…
Tweets in response to some local authorities across the UK suggesting people pack a #GrabBag in September 2019.
Elements from various survival manuals.
Elements from the UK Government’s ‘National Risk Register’; a public document created every two years that outlines the active risks to the UK. (We used the 2017 edition, but an updated version was released in 2020)
You might wonder why the performers are using iPods and headphones… In some sections we use a technique called ‘Headphone Verbatim’ - this means that although the performers know the words, during the performance they listen to the recording of the original interview, and attempt to speak in-time with this recording. This helps them to keep the intonation and speech pattern from the person we interviewed (including all the um’s, er’s, and stumbles), which makes it feel like you’re watching a ‘real person’ not just a performer saying lines.
If you have any more questions or comments about the show you can get in touch with us here
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