Morgan and Rowley have been around the block, collaborated with hundreds of people and interviewed many more on their weekly arts programme for Radio Cardiff – Pitch - so, as Rowley says, “If we’d wanted to we could have filled all of the performances with people we knew, but we didn’t want to do that, we wanted new voices.” Morgan adds that, when they put out an open call for people to participate, then travelled around Wales to meet them, they had hoped those shepherds and auctioneers would turn up, “Those people who use their voices in a particular way for a particular reason, but whose voices are heard less and less in Wales.” The problem was that the very people they were interested in meeting didn’t seem to think that their vocal skills were anything special and didn’t materialise. In fact it was only by chance that they met the (at the time) future Mayor of Bangor, who had only come to open up the hired audition venue and offered them tea. They mentioned to her that they had hoped for a bingo caller to turn up and were disappointed that no one had come forward. At that point she mentioned that she did a bit of bingo-calling herself and suddenly found herself part of the project. In the event the three nights of performance clashed with her inauguration as Mayor of Bangor so she was beamed in from Bangor to the theatre’s video screens. Despite the beaming and the streaming, Morgan insists that the performance wasn’t particularly hi-tech and was all done without rehearsal or even a full run-through due to the logistics of trying to get all of the participants from all over Wales into one place at the same time – some only arrived a couple of hours before the performance. “People often say that our work looks rehearsed’, Rowley says, “but we don’t [rehearse]…you could ask why did we make the decision to do x or y. The truth is things just happen”, Morgan adds, “but there’s always a clear plan there, we’re responsible for keeping things on course.” The decision to steer rather than direct was an important one. Apart from allowing each performer a maximum of six minutes, they were allowed to do their own thing. Rowley thinks for a minute, “One of the important things I’ve realised since is that the participants were doing exactly what they would have been doing in their own way – they weren’t directed and so were comfortable, with no pressure or anxiety about letting people down.”
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I ask them how they approached the performance as directors, and they are clear that they didn’t want to direct. Instead they created a structure and a format for presentation, allowing the performers to do their thing in their time slot. So each night the participants took to one of three stages, placed around the black box theatre’s edge; the audience at the centre, swiveling heads and then moving as the lights came up above one stage or another, or faces appeared on the large video screens then the turn over, the lights dimmed and went up over another stage. They’d designed the performance to run for an hour and ten minutes and to Rowley’s amazement, “Incredibly each of the three nights came in at one hour and ten.” This is incredible when all of the things that could have gone wrong are factored in, including the link-ups to other parts of the world – the live feeds to screen. And the live feeds here are important – not only were poets and players beamed into the Chapter theatre but the whole performance was beamed out every night via the Chapter website. More importantly the event was free. As Morgan commented, “People are now used to paying seven or eight pounds to sit in a cinema in Wales and watch live performances streamed at them from London. We wanted to reverse that and beam our performance out of Wales, and we wanted access to be free”. Looking at the breakdown of who was watching the live streaming they could see that there were people in Switzerland or Japan watching a yodeler, a rapper, a stand-up comedian, school children, a father and daughter double act, a performer of a Japanese Noh theatre, a singing saw, a young girl singing to a paper cup accompaniment, the New York Players (via smart phone relay), occasionally introduced (and sincerely performed) in the insincere sing-song voice of a telephone announcer (“Please hold the line, your call is important to us”). They have resisted the urge to re-present the performances as films, despite the fact that all three nights were documented on video, as, for them, seeing the work in real time is the key to the work’s success. Does Lleisiau fit within the Dylan Thomas 100 festival? As RS Thomas would say, “H’m”. But is it a necessary component? Definitely. If Dylan Thomas is the carrot to attract attention to Welsh culture – to a culture that’s still living, breathing, moving on and not contemplating the navel of its past - then good cop bad cop’s Lleisiau is a vital part of a cultural continuum. — CCQ