“It starts with something small like creating a hologram of the deceased” – Irish Times

In a 1989 interview with Theater Ireland magazine, I spoke to the founders of Big Terry, an independent theater company founded by Kent University drama graduates Zoe Seaton, Jill Holmes and Kate Butts. The company is now Northern Ireland’s oldest specialist company and remains driven by this glittering trio’s early ambitions: to create work that always surprises, inspires and captures the imagination.

Over the years, Big Terry has built an international reputation for innovation and artistic daring, pushing the boundaries of traditional theater and fostering site-specific collaborations across other genres and disciplines.

Its latest project, Granny Jackson’s Dead, is written and directed by Seaton. Staged at her parents’ home in Belfast, the eccentric production is a realistic reenactment of an Irish wake, and has been described as “the session to end all sessions, just what grandma would have wanted.” This presentation combines tradition and technology as a fictional family grapples with how to free Grandma’s spirit while preserving her digital legacy.

The work will be unveiled for the first time this month at the NI Science Festival, in partnership with Manchester Metropolitan University, the UK National Center for Social Research and the Center for Cultural Values ​​at the University of Leeds. It was one of only five projects to receive a Collaborate Fund research grant last year, which supports innovative research projects between the cultural sector and academics, in this case Immersive Theater and Arts-Led Dialogue. We study the intersection of and focus on its effects. Digitization of memory and mourning.

From the beginning, it was clear that this company was going to do things differently. The decision was taken to move away from the independent theater hub of Belfast and base it at Seaton’s home base in Portstewart, a seaside town on the north Antrim coast. For several years, they worked as a collective, writing, starring in, producing, and directing their own productions, while also publishing radical interpretations of the classics.

The structure of the company changed when Butts moved to Tasmania and Holmes was appointed artistic officer at Downpatrick and then director of the newly established Market Place Theater in Armagh. Seaton has always had a passion for directing, so the decision to take on the role of artistic director was a natural one. In the years that followed, she emerged as an influential and innovative force in theater in Ireland, England, and elsewhere.

In 2005, Seaton made a bold move by collaborating with musical theater expert Paul Boyd on The Little Mermaid, an epic nonverbal, water-based version of Andersen’s fairy tale set in a swimming pool. showed that. By the time it closed a year and a half later, she had performed in front of more than 30,000 people in pools around the world.

“This was a breakthrough piece for us as our first site-specific piece,” says Seaton. “I had previously done a lot of work in England and had been offered a job with Hull Truck Theater Company. I spoke to artistic director John Godber about what kind of work I wanted to make. , he cited “The Little Mermaid” as an example. He said no other company would let me do it, and he thought it would be much more achievable to do it at my company. I did.

“I always thought it was inevitable that I would someday live permanently in the UK, but a conversation with John changed my perspective on things. I had always felt that what Big Tely represented was artistic freedom. , a gift I hadn’t fully appreciated until then.

“Adventure and curiosity are still in our nature. It’s our lifeblood, putting together a team of people who are excited about a new idea, working on it and making it happen. It’s somehow a repeat-based process. It feels easier than doing more pieces. We’re all along for the ride.”

The company slowly gained momentum as it expanded its business in exciting and unpredictable directions that audiences expected. In Seaton’s words, “We take over familiar stories and spaces such as shops, homes, and cafes to make our audiences feel safe and courageous. We combine tradition and technology. , creating bold new worlds of storytelling with and for the broader community.”

She thinks the Creative Shops project will be the next big turning point. The company had established a solid reputation for quality touring productions, but for funding reasons everything had to be planned meticulously in advance, which meant that valuable artistic freedom was diluted. I did.

In 2011, Coleraine Borough Council commissioned them to create a piece in relation to the Olympic Torch which would pass through the town the following year. They offered a hefty fee of 500 pounds, or about 580 euros at today’s exchange rates. Not one to turn down an opportunity, Seaton contacted two outstanding performers, Sherry Atkinson and Ichaso Molina, whom he had met in England and who are still connected to the company.

“We invited them over the weekend to help put something together in the shop window,” she says. “We held a full and complete Olympic Games in a disused old bank window on the Portstewart seafront. We filled it with sand and held it in four specific time slots. We created a 10-minute silent clown production. By the end of the weekend, 450 people had watched the show, many of them asking what the next show was. If we did it in theaters, three people would have watched it. I would have been lucky to have included it.

“We realized that if we were only working in venues, arts centers, or specific groups, we were losing 80 per cent of our population. It was a common space. We didn’t advertise. We just wanted people to walk by, peek in the windows, and take part in what was on offer. Before long, we became locals. We began conversations with traders in the city and tracked the economics of the work, keeping in mind the value of art to the town’s independent businesses.

“We have devised many more short works for other public spaces, which have attracted enthusiastic audiences. We have recruited creative arts trainees and have them not only create new works We challenged ourselves to question how we invite and welcome the public. We were questioning the context of being there as much as the content of what we were offering.”

The more I dug into it, the more it felt like a living subject, something that could be worn at home and that people could visit and play a specific role in.

When the company started working with Coney, a famous London-based immersive company, to create games, a brave new world opened up. Together, they developed an app that accelerates users’ reckless journeys to familiar and unknown destinations. That experience served them well when the coronavirus pandemic subsided.

At a time when many independent businesses have folded, Big Telly has thrived with its thrilling mix of interactive online adventures, and its fragmented stories have powerfully connected with audiences around the world. Additionally, technology has enabled the company to track spontaneous audience responses and participation. This unexpected success made Seaton increasingly interested in his digital technology, from which the idea for “Jackson’s Grandma Dead” was born.

“Digital memorialization is about how we remember people in the future,” Seaton explains. “I found an article about a family who lost a young boy. They took all the videos of him and created a computer game so everyone could have fun playing with him. Some people might think that’s awful. But it was their story and their way.

“An entire industry is growing around grief technology and digital memory. It starts in small ways, like sending and receiving messages from the bereaved’s social media or creating holograms of the deceased.

“The more we dug into it, the more it felt like a living subject, something that could be worn around the house and that people could visit and play a specific role in. and technologists about digital theater and whether a live feel is important. The researchers are particularly interested in whether this kind of thing is good for us. I wonder who is checking what the is doing to our heads.”

Although this work is domestic and accessible, it also contains larger issues to consider. Some may decide on the best way to remember Grandma Jackson, while others may think more about how she would like to be remembered or remembered.

Seaton read an article on digital mourning by Eleanor O’Keeffe of the National Center for Social Research. She contacted me and we started a conversation.

“We had decided to make a theater piece, but we didn’t know where we would do it. We started brainstorming ideas with researchers, and we came up with the idea of ​​doing it at home.” We started looking for an academic partner and were really pleased when Manchester Metropolitan University came on board.

“It was a great achievement to work with the University’s Drama Department on the dramaturgy and with the Digital Arts School where the digital assets were created. They include an avatar of Grandma Jackson, so viewers can , or if you’re feeling brave, you can meet her virtually at home.”

Granny Jackson’s Dead is located at 47 Malone Road, Belfast, BT9 6RY. NI Science Festivalfrom February 15th (Thursday) to February 25th (Sunday)