Olivia Winteringham is one of the three co-artistic directors of Birmgham's Kindle Theatre company, which creates boundary-breaking theatrical performances that often involve food – they performed their show Eat Your Heart out at IdeasTap's Coming Up festival in 2011. Here, she explains her need for pasta makers, fear and space...
Full name/age/job title:
Olivia Winteringham, 28, Co-Artistic Director, Kindle Theatre.
What does your job involve?
Lots. Cooking up new performance ideas and projects, day-to-day emailing and planning long term. Attending performances, reading. Fundraising, late-nights agonising over applications and copy. Drinking: tea, coffee and beer with collaborating artists, producers, promoters and potential funders. Sitting in the back of jam-packed cars, sweaty trains, coaches and occasionally planes. Doing all this with Sam and Emily, the other co-artistic directors.
Five things you couldn't work without:
1. Other people
This can be other artists’ work and the audiences who come to see our performances. A direct relationship with the audience is a vital dynamic in our performances. Collaboration is also very important because we don’t make our performances alone, we have worked with lots of different artists and specialists from food designers, a fire breather and ballroom dancers to large ensembles of students and established practitioners.
2. The Works shorthand notebooks
I now have a stack that date back to 2008. They are filled with useful things: lists, scrawls and lots of scribbling out.
3. Terror
Maybe it’s not terror but a bit of fear is useful. Fear of failing, first-night fear, fear of breaking a limb leaping off staging, fear of getting it all wrong. There is a certain thrill to the unknown and things changing direction. Being open to change and learning how to be better, how to be more audacious and how to do it even bigger, louder but more precisely.
4. Space
Whether it’s the huge A.E. Harris warehouse run by Stan’s Cafe where we can be big and chaotic and undisturbed, or mac birmingham, which has a kinder floor, heating, a cafe and a massive park on its doorstep. Physical space to test new ideas, rehearse and take up residence is valuable.
5. Pasta machine
This is probably one of the best things I have ever bought. It speeds up the time it takes to turn out 50 pasta vaginas a night, a vital ingredient in one of our projects, Hotel du Van.
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