Once upon a time a bunch of like-minded Edge Hill drama students had a dream. They wanted to do something, not for money, but because they believed in it. With talent, training and dedication, and armed with box-fresh degree certificates, they set up Tenderfoot Theatre. Motivated by a desire to highlight the climate threat facing our planet, the company set out on a quest to find a happy ending.
Meet the Tenderfoot cast…
“This company is medicine for a lot of people. The fact that it’s built on a foundation of connecting with nature, connecting with other people, making art, telling stories, exploring your truth, in an environment that’s geared up to benefit your mental and your physical health. It really is medicine.”
Meet Georgie, the company director of Tenderfoot Theatre, currently in-residence at Edge Hill University. They write and develop their own work, they run workshops for Edge Hill drama undergraduates, and, to paraphrase Orson Welles, they get to do it all in the The Arts Centre, the best toy an actor can have.
They’re also pioneers:
“We’re kind of a little bit on the avant garde of an artistic movement:eco theatre. It’s a new kind of concern that we could approach in any way. Given the state of the world and climate change, I’m thinking about how we have to think about new ways to confront that.”
This is Dan. Dan is the theatrical director of Tenderfoot Theatre, a new kind of company that looks to highlight the environmental issues the world faces. But from a positive perspective – what Georgie refers to as the Hope Principle. They want to inspire hope…and activism. And to make theatre that is sustainable. Ambitious much?
“We’ve just done a show in London which was a short comedy piece, and because it’s funny, you feel more engaged to discuss it. With our last touring production, although it did have the characters that you felt that you connected with, it was more sombre. It started different conversations. Not less engaging, but you’re less inclined to talk about the heavy stuff. With comedy, you’re like, ‘oh, I enjoyed that, let’s continue talking about that’.”
Here’s Fran, production manager of Tenderfoot Theatre. She started out with Georgie at another university, decided it wasn’t quite right for her and took some time out, before they both found their way to Edge Hill, where they met Dan…
…and Kate:
“I wasn’t planning on doing a drama degree, so I hadn’t planned for it. When I came in, we were part of a staff-led theatre company. I had no intention of doing costume design, either, but I’d done textiles and I did know how to sew. So I got given this role of costume designer for a piece. I was like, ‘I’ve never done this before, I’m a first year, what…?’ But I learned on the job. With this degree you get to dabble in everything.”
Kate is costume and set designer for Tenderfoot Theatre. She met Georgie, Fran and Dan on the Edge Hill drama degree. Her sustainable designs use recycled and upcycled materials. She can make costumes from kombucha leather and onion dye. She also recycles words, as the company’s chief scriptwriter. And then recycles those scripts to make papier mache props.
Everyone is roped in to everything at Tenderfoot, but they each have a particular (or peculiar?) skillset. She works a lot with Joe:
“I deal with everything, from a box that needs to be moved from one side of a room to another, to constructing sets, to generally fiddling about and making things work. Very simple logistics, the construction side of things. Very, very hands on. Material work.”
Joe is head of operations at Tenderfoot Theatre. On debut show Impact, Joe had the unenviable task of pulling together a stage full of natural materials, including 800 litres of soil. Saving the planet’s a dirty job, but someone’s gotta do it. Usually Joe.
There’s one other member of the team: Chrissy, the media producer. She couldn’t make our group chat, but she helped take the company digital when Covid forced us all into varying forms of isolation. Everyone had to learn to do things a little differently.
From Edge Hill University students to pro theatre makers
A little background. The group got together on the BA (Hons) Drama degree. Georgie and Fran had already met, but they all bonded on a particular module, finding inspiration in each other’s company, and a common interest in telling the story of our planet:
“We all had slightly different approaches to it, but shared this undertone of looking at the planet and the way life needs to be protected, sustainability, all of that kind of thing. It’s something that’s important to all of us, and we spent time really researching the eco-theatre movement and where we felt that we fit,” says Georgie.
So they set out to do a show together, and five years later they’re still together, holed up in residence in Edge Hill’s Arts Centre, surviving pandemics, and life’s other slings and arrows. They’ve really grown up together, as close-knit as families.
And the project really gathered momentum, adds Kate:
“I got into this because we went to university together and we just had this desire to make more, get creative and keep going with our practice, even when we’d finish our exams, we just wanted more to do.”
A little more background. Edge Hill’s BA (Hons) in Drama isn’t an acting degree. It’s a holistic degree about making theatre, it’s about performance and environment, it’s as much about how to stage a play as performance. Without this approach, Tenderfoot Theatre may not even exist. Each member has major and minor roles to play. They can do this because the course encouraged them to follow their interests, be that acting, producing, directing, writing or designing. Kate didn’t intend to be a designer and writer; Georgie didn’t dream of leading a company; Dan wasn’t set on directing. They all found their niche as the course progressed, the company formed almost organically.
To the university’s performing arts department, their progress has been a thing of joy, says Fran:
“Partly due to the pandemic I think we got very close to the teaching staff. It was such a disruptive time, and they were so supportive. Seeing us move on into the career that we wanted to follow has been lovely for them. So they couldn’t do enough to support us, which is really, really nice.”
Georgie continues:
“And it’s really important to us that we give back. We were very lucky that while we were here, there was an awful lot going on that meant that you had a lot of opportunity to go and spread your wings on an extracurricular level. We thought, ‘you know what, it was the best thing for us, and we’d really love to pass that on, hand it down to the next generation of students. That community we’re building now is really at the heart of what we’re trying to do.”
And it seems like their efforts aren’t unappreciated:
“We institute things called the Eco Lab,” explains Dan. “We basically have an open space for [Edge Hill undergrads] to make work in an eco theatre structure, with our methods, to make something unique. And we’ve been using all the second-hand costumes fo r them. So these resources will have been used, reused, changed. But we’ve got such a sense of community, they’ve started to call themselves the Tender Toes. We love them.”
Graduates with a cause
Debut show ‘Impact’ was created while in residence at The Chapel, Ormskirk’s Arts House, as part of the Climate Change Theatre Action Festival 2021. They began to build a network in the wider Ormskirk and West Lancashire community, calling on people and organisations to help build a sustainable set (remember all that soil…?!). Their story became the community’s story.
In subsequent pieces they’ve put ocean plastic, eco-anxiety, family planning in the face of climate change, and the importance of green spaces in communities under the microscope.
In their short lifetime, they’ve toured several projects around the country. Their mission and message could be perceived as pretty heavy going – how has their work been received?
Dan: “It’s lovely if you make something that people then feel that they have to go away and process. It means you’ve reached them and you’ve touched them in a way that they have to go home and think about it. That’s pretty heavy. But much better that you make them entertained, and in the process of being entertained they’re like. ‘oh…’”
Georgie: “We try and hone in on that tangible action. What can actually be done? Where can we find hope? Because there is hope and there are things we can do. So we try and model that as best we can in terms of the journeys our characters go on, to be able to communicate that all of this is very horrible, but here are things you can actually do, and here are the places you can actually find hope. And the point is it’s actual. It’s not ideally you could do this. It’s no, actually, you could do this.”
Kate: “At the end of the day, we’re making theatre – we’re making entertainment. So first and foremost, it has to be a good piece of theatre. And a lot of people are finding, us included, that humour is the best way to do it. If something’s funny, people are connecting with it and relating to it.”
And why we love live performance…
As storytellers, the company believe wholeheartedly in the power of a tale well told. They should know – it’s why they’re here now, doing what they’re doing.
Kate studied A Streetcar Named Desire at GCSE. She went to see it at Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre. It was the first play she’d seen live: “I saw a whole new world in my head, this possibility of putting text on stage.” Seeing Maxine Peake as Blanche “blew [her] socks off”. Her head was well and truly turned.
Georgie grew up with theatre, but the one that made her sit up and think about the relationship between humanity and the natural world was a play about the foot and mouth outbreak in the early noughties called And Then Came the Night Jars. It tells the tragic tale of a farmer who is forced to put his cows down. It brought home the duty of care humans have to the plants and animals around them, and lit a fire in Georgie, “how we can tell stories of species that aren’t ours, and how we can do that with empathy and with sincerity.”
Dan grew up on the doorstep of a Welsh dramatic institution, Theatr Clywd in Mold (one of Edge Hill’s partner institutions, btw). He got to see big productions like Cat On A Hot Tin Roof. But the real impact came as part of its youth programme, and the spirit of small, community-based arts projects. These projects exposed him to the lives and stories of people he might have never met in everyday life – disabled groups, people with dementia – “it just cracked my eggshell wide open.”
Fran got the theatre bug from her dad, who dabbled in amateur dramatics. He was a painter and decorator, “not someone you’d expect to do theatre”. She remembers seeing him in Fiddler on the Roof, and thinking if he can do it, so can I. This thought came a step closer after seeing Benedict Cumberbatch in Hamlet at the National Theatre. On the two-hour coach ride home, all she thought about was applying to do drama at uni.
And if you ask Joe’s family, they always knew he was theatre-bound. He loved Shakespeare so much he almost wore out the VHS videotape (remember them?!?!) of Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing, at the tender age of five. But a recent trip to see some classical Greek theatre reminded him of the potential of theatre, its power, and the creative licence it lends. Antigone is written and performed in ancient Greek, but Joe was able to get completely “lost in it… you’re still seeing the relationships on stage unfold, and you’re still seeing the action, and it still makes sense.” Antigone was swiftly followed by Lysistrata, which Joseph describes as “pure filth…absolutely brilliant…really cool.”
But before you think they’re way too high brow, though, don’t worry, they all have plenty of time for panto, a mainstay of their childhoods.
When we meet they’re just about to begin work on their latest eco-opus. Kate and Georgie are delivering first drafts of the new project, around the importance of green spaces in bringing people together. They’re already looking at it from the perspective of their particular strengths – I’m present at the dawn of something new. It’s exciting, and the energy is contagious.
With nothing to contribute, I leave them to it. A small group of Gen Z twenty-somethings, growing up in turbulent times, determined to control the narrative, and inspire some happier endings.
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Catch the Tenderfoot team in OutHaus at The Arts Centre – free for EHU students
September 30, 2024
