Interview with Steven Hoggett, Movement Director

How much did you refer to the original novel, when creating the movement for the production?

The draft that Joel Horwood had done was a very smart adaptation that used an inherent theatricality on a book that was unstageable. As movement directors, what we try to do is hold the novel in the back of our mind, and every now and again it might solve a problem, but it’s surprising how infrequent that is. Staging challenges are very rarely solved by going back to the book. There were occasional moments where we looked at the destruction of Skarthatch, for example, and there might be an adjective or a phrase or a line that guided us, but I would say the book is very rarely a touchstone for what you need to solve in a rehearsal.

How have you worked with the other members of the team, particularly in terms of the Director, Puppet Director and Movement Director dynamic?

The Director Katy Rudd, is great at lining up departmental kinds of elements. That’s where it gets easy. I’ve worked with the Puppet Director Finn Caldwell, on a few shows now. Finn and I can make things in isolation, but we actually do always feel like we get the best results working in the room together, and again it’s where Katy will be there to nudge it and to shape it.

Katy does trust me to a point now where if I know that it’s not right, I will walk away from it, I won’t push. I think there’s a lot to be said for Katy spinning a lot of plates. I think, of course, it’s trust. It’s also about supporting each other because there’s lots of moments in the show where I would need the lighting department to solve something that I had going on, even the score: I’ve asked the Composer, Jherek Bischoff, to bring things up in tempo or down in tempo. I was always asking Finn for different angles and puppetry for us to be able to scoop performers underneath. A show like Ocean is really a testament to the power of the team. The show is based on the ensemble idea, that there are these characters that are supporting the narrative of the Boy and his life. In the same way, on a show like Ocean the team are mirroring that exactly, and that’s when we start to make great work together, or work that feels good.

Can you tell us a little more about how you have worked with the music on The Ocean at the End of the Lane?

Interestingly, the day that I received a draft of Ocean a friend of mine had sent me an album called Cistern by this friend of hers called Jherek Bischoff. I know this sounds like a cliché, but it’s absolutely true. It was a Saturday morning and I put the album on, and I started reading the draft. At the end of it I just emailed Katy and said “I’ve had this thing just happen to me. I’ve been listening to this album and read the script at the same time, and I think this world is the same”.

I listened to that album a lot, not just for work but for pleasure. I think Cistern is a beautiful album. In lots of ways things like that are great for me because I know every beat and every phrase on the album, so when it comes to being in the rehearsal room it feels like somebody’s given me a map of how physicality might sit and I just line things up alongside this musical phrasing. In my position, you are given an absolute gift. Cistern is an extant album. It already existed, and we didn’t use all existing music so then Jherek, of course, ended up on the show, came in and composed some tracks and my dream was made real: I’m making sequences and Jherek is scoring them alongside my sequences. That was absolutely joyous.

How do you run your first couple of days of rehearsal?

On the first day we’ll do lots of exercises to create the sense of an ensemble and that will also include the other performers as well. We’ll do exercises where they really are working together as a huge team, using peripheral vision and creating lots of physical material. I also really like it in rehearsals where you know, there might be a section in the Hunger Birds, but it was created by the performer playing Old Mrs Hempstock because we all make material together, and then cross pollinate. You all learn each other’s two-bar phrase. Everybody’s creative juices and work is sewn into the fabric of the show. There’s a chance you aren’t performing our sequence at all, but you can see your work in there, because you are part of this creative team that came together. You create idiosyncratic performances out of that because it’s only by virtue of those people being in the room that those sequences end up being made and looking the way they do.

In the first few days, it’s very intense and we just make a tonne of material – some of it ends up in the show, some of it doesn’t. We watch a Haka (see page 45 for background information on the Haka), we watch music videos, and we look at particular strands or elements in a music video and ask the cast to derive stuff from that. We’ll use really simple instructions, for example, ‘create an underwater creature that’s not been found yet’ to create these beautiful creatures and some of them are huge and some are tiny but really, it’s things that everybody can achieve and make people move in ways that they wouldn’t have done in a rehearsal room.

I’ve always liked the idea that people come and see our performers in a show like this and their friends and family would never have seen them move in this way before.

What influences your work on the production? Are there cultural references within the work that we might look for?

Let’s talk about Lettie’s confrontation, which we call ‘The Haka’. There’s a very famous Haka when New Zealand played against France. It’s on YouTube as ‘the best Haka of all time’ and as a group of people we just watched that, and we talked about the spirit of it and the defiance of it, but also the fact that there’s this power. We don’t do the facial stuff or the tongue stuff or try to frighten people in our version of The Haka. We then thought well, let’s just imagine if this is from the back because, really when we see it, we only see the back of Lettie. Most of it is from the back so look how much power can you get from short, sharp moves. Then you can start to play with iconography, and there’s the great feminist poster image with the woman with her arm up. So we asked “okay, how can you how you appropriate it? How can you put that in the middle of a Haka?” If it’s a feminine stance, then you can refer to feminist iconography and you can just slip it in the sequence as well, it sits there. Powerful female imagery and Beyoncé Knowles is in there as well, but because of the framework of it, it doesn’t scream out.

We made the Haka in groups of three to start with and we put them up against each other. You can then have a Haka-off against each other’s teams. Then when you work down to the individual it’s much more at the essence of that performer and where they think Lettie is as a character. For Nia Towle, who played Lettie in the West End production, Lettie is very much of the earth. There’s lots of things about grit and soil. The blowing came from a Destiny’s Child video for ‘Lose My Breath’. I refer to it quite a lot: it’s Destiny’s Child versus Destiny’s Child and they’re dancing off each other and they get dust blown into each other’s face, so that’s often referred to. It’s about taking pop culture and then deep-rooted male power – the culture of opposition. Striking fear into their enemy’s heart but using the most minimal, the most deep-rooted power in the small and compact being, which is exactly what Lettie is. That’s something that I haven’t used on anything else, it was just for Ocean

It never ever fails to be a really exciting day in the rehearsal room. The room really kind of gets fired up and energised. It’s also the piece in the show where I felt the harmony between Jherek, myself and Katy and this idea we had about a sequence. Jherek’s music track absolutely empowers the performer to really get inside it. It’s a great piece of music. It’s one of the best in the show, I feel.

Does the movement change when you have new cast members or is it completely set in stone?

It does change. It’s changed quite a lot in our various runs. It changes for other reasons than cast changes as well. We were in the round originally in the Dorfman theatre, and then we were end-on when we transferred to the West End. The stage space was smaller in some aspects. There are also these four performers called Mnemonics and they’re the means by which the Boy’s story unravels - he puts a story and narrative together and they create the environments around him. They tend to create environments, put him in jeopardy, or sometimes they save him. The idea – and it’s such a distinct ensemble concept – is that four performers will require four completely different takes on it and so that changed more than anything else.

Their skill set was very different. The first set were very much like physical theatre performers and our second set were actors with really strong movement skills and of course, that changes everything. We also wanted to change everything within the context of things like sequences. So, the sequence with Lettie up against Skarthatch (The Haka) – that was completely redone for Nia because she was different physically and verbally, and we’ll probably change it again for the tour. Things are quite idiosyncratic.

It is useful to let go of definitives when it comes to shows like this, particularly with performers who need to invest so heavily in it that you need to give them the opportunity to create and take on ownership of it. On Ocean we’ve made some idiosyncratic, physical work, with and on performers, and you move it across performers, and you can see where it’s just been put on them. You can’t see them finding their breath in it, or the blood in it, and you just have to just say, ‘well, that’s not a phrase for them. What else is here for them and where can we find it? What kind of territory are we in? What are they? What are their physical beings and then how do we fit it into what they do?’ Some performers just don’t work without that kind of investment so we’re more than happy to do that.

Is there another section that you think is particularly successful?

There’s a piece during the Ursula ‘doors’ section where Jherek brings in this bass frequency into the music and it’s as the doors appear. The appearance of some doors shouldn’t be terrifying but what Jherek does musically makes some doors seem genuinely frightening. For things like that we just create simple stage images and what he’s done with the composition is extraordinary. Days like that are really exciting, then the design team get behind it and sound design get behind it and then before you know it what was great, is stunning.

What advice would you give to students who find it difficult to hold their nerve in the devising process?

It’s about a sense of intention. Things can be scrappy as hell, and the first time we did the Hunger Bird sequence it looked awful; there was zero focusing, but the physical commitment and the articulation of performance was beautiful, unusual and unnerving. So, it’s like, “okay, that’s going to work, park it”. It’s great, the performers were really getting into the devising process, it just looked like a dog’s dinner. You couldn’t tell what was going on. There was no narrative structure to speak of, you didn’t know where to look, but in essence the qualitative nature was good. The performers were committing to the process like mad, so we didn’t worry about it. We could clean it. We could figure something out because the intention is there.