Penelope Bartlau and the magic of collaboration

As Artistic Director, Penelope Bartlau is the driving force and creative vision behind the independent group Barking Spider^® Visual Theatre. Barking Spider Visual Theatre creates and presents works of stunning beauty and breathtaking ambition, combining art forms which include visual art installation, puppetry, and immersive performance. Barking Spider Visual Theatre invites audiences to notice the previously unnoticed, and to see the familiar in new ways.

Thanks for talking with us today. Barking Spider is such an innovative organisation … could you please explain a little bit about what it does?

Barking Spider Visual Theatre (BSVT) started life as a tiny little company making weird and wonderful puppetry works. Within a short period of time, after the first two years of existence, BSVT began to shift, quite radically, into other art forms and working in sectors/areas outside of traditional theatre spaces. I saw a gap in the museums and galleries sector as one example. Over many years I have focused BSVT across this and other sectors as specialists in generating bespoke works.

What is your why? What gets you out of bed in the morning?
I really love the transformative power of the arts. I love watching people become inspired through experiencing awe, wonder and curiosity. I aim to make us feel differently about the world, and for us to question what we think we know about time, place, and fact. In a podcast I listened to recently, (RadioIab), a scientist said (and I am paraphrasing): ‘Every time I learn something new, I realise how little I know. When I don’t know something and I glimpse into new knowledge, whole worlds of possibility open up’. My heart sang when she said this. This is my ‘why’. This is a constant driver for me as a creator and is – as you asked – what gets me out of bed in the morning.

There’s something in your work which challenges audiences to find the hidden and obscured in the everyday, and to see it anew. Do you agree with that statement?
Definitely. I am fascinated by hidden, obscured, denied, unrecognised, invisible and unsung stories. My interest lies in unearthing these stories, which are often historical, and interpreting them for contemporary audiences. The risk is for anyone creating in this vein, is that audiences/visitors could find the works unapproachable. I aim to remain an ally of the viewer. With every work I create I advocate for the audience’s experience. Without this approach, I would run the risk of creating work that is in itself obscured and hidden, which at best would be wanky and at worst, boring. The works I create usually have an easy-to-access ‘first impression’ entry point, but incorporate detail that rewards the curious.

We think of you as a true collaborator. You collaborate with both artists and non-artists, children and adults, communities and industries to generate ideas and present compelling stories to contemporary audiences. Is collaboration important to you, and if so, why?
I LOVE collaborating. What does collaborating mean though? In any given situation, whether creating with professional artists or anyone else, I run with the belief that there is no hierarchy of ideas. Why should the idea of a 4-year-old child have any less (or more) weight than that of anyone else in the room? When I was at the VCA (Victorian College of the Arts), there was a pervasive culture in the Production School at the time that went something like this: if you were on the technical side of the room, you NEVER crossed the line into the creative space. I thought this was a very binary way of thinking, and one day, Ed, a 1st year student, was sweeping up, at the back of the studio. At the other end of the studio I was trying to solve some ridiculous puppetry conundrum, working with puppeteers on the problem, when Ed piped up with a simple, elegant solution. A pin could have dropped as the other tech/production folk stopped in consternation and horror… But, we tested Ed’s idea and it worked. It was a transformative moment for everyone in the room, and for me, crystallised the principle of ‘there is no such thing as a hierarchy of ideas’.

With children/young people in particular, I see the difference between youth and age is years not ideas. An older person, may have the skills and experience to execute an idea that someone younger may not (yet) have – and that’s the only difference.