Madelaine Moore Talks Swimming On Stage
The world premiere of Glacier is hitting the stage at Old Fire Station in Oxford next month. Written by award-winning writer and comedian Alison Spittle, this dark comedy theatre show is an ode to friendship, wild swimming and seeking solace at Christmas. Ahead of the run, we asked the director of the show, Madelaine Moore, about just HOW the cast will be wild swimming across the stage this December:

"The first thing that anyone asks after reading Glacier is ‘How are you going to do the swimming?’. It’s a really nice theatrical problem to be presented with, so since about March this year, I’ve been thinking about it. A lot. Swimming on stage has had a couple of really good examples recently: Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s channel swimming play, ‘When the Long Trick's Over’ suspended the actor in a harness from a frame. Katie Greenall’s ‘Blubber’, used projection, lighting and a perspex box to depict synchronised swimming. Karim Khan’s ‘Brown Boys Swim’ used movement and a very simple bit of stage design with movable cabinets and a changing room bench. However, the brilliant Allison has written a full blown ‘swim-chase’ in Glacier so none of those were an option! With the constraints of creating a lake in a small space with limited resources, I immediately realise that naturalism was not going to work, so I started to think about a) the qualities of swimming vs moving on land and b) the practical consideration of audience sightlines, ease for actors (swimming while delivering pages of dialogue is trickier than it may seem), and creating a sense of travelling through a large body of water while only having a 10m x 4m performance space. At Old Fire Station the audience are right on top of the actors and in the set we have a 70cm high wooden jetty above the ‘water’ level of the lake. Standing and doing abstract ‘swimming’ wouldn’t have worked as the levels of the actors in the environment would have been all off. I wanted to get the gliding feeling you get from moving through water, so my first idea was using skateboards which the actors lay on and propel themselves forward with their arms, but then their faces wouldn’t be very visible. After a summer of tossing this about in my head, I remembered an old job where I spent a lot of time alone in a large office and for fun I used to spin about on my wheelie chair - wheelie chairs can be propelled by feet, leaving hands free for swim strokes. They put the actors almost at water level. They can be pushed off into a space and travel for a while without further powering. Cut to the second day of rehearsals; three office chairs and three game actors and our Movement Director, Mark Conway experimenting with all the different ways they can sit, move and spin on chairs. We’ve even managed to create the Butterfly on the chair. It’s silly and graceful, funny and functional: it just works!"
Glacier is at Old Fire Station Monday 4 – Saturday 23 December 2023, tickets and more information can be found here:
Comments