Colin Nightingale - Punchdrunk and beyond: Colin Nightingale on Art, Space, and Immersive

Colin (00:00) ⁓ by with the use of text and that we needed a more physical language in the work. And then that's when Maxine Doyle was brought in as a choreographer and then ultimately kind of became co-director on these kind of large scale shows. ⁓ And so there was stuff that was going on learning the art form. And then I'd sort of say really from, in a way, in some ways from sort of Faust onwards, there wasn't a lot being learned. creatively other than just giving space, more space for the performance to go deeper and deeper and the set design to develop and become more developed. But what you were starting to do was learn, I mean, we were starting to learn that this format, which didn't seem to make any sense financially, started to make sense when you ran the shows for longer. And so therefore you start to understand that what you need to be looking at is the capitalization of the project and then the running costs of it. And if you can, yeah, if you can get an opportunity to run the show for long enough, then you can then put more money into the capitalization of it. And and then suddenly these crazy elaborate worlds which you're dreaming of can start to actually become a reality. So then, yeah, you sort of get to you get to Sleep No New York and then things do start to shift because Sleep No More New York was the first commercially produced project and it starts bringing money into the organization that actually then means you actually have an organisation, you you can start to actually imagine having an office and it having people in it that are doing quite functional things. But then in itself, that does then start to mean that as you start to grow. Steve Usher (01:33) Hmm. Hmm. Colin (01:45) Yeah, different pressures come in that mean that you aren't just, yeah, you haven't just run away with the circus now. Yeah, the organization needs to start to mature and start to grow up and it needs to make decisions sometimes based on income that needs to come in to actually support the organization. Steve Usher (02:05) that was navigated and evolved? Yeah Colin (02:05) I mean, I think up until Sleep Memoir New York, we were just very fortunate. Yeah, a series of opportunities kept presenting themselves that actually meant we were always quite busy. mean, there was actually a... There's a very funny thing. We did Mask of the Red Death and it was a big, big effort on everybody and it closed in... 2008, I think, sort of like the early summer or late spring. there was a period we'd got that money from the Arts Council would come in for kind of regular funding. So it was the opportunity for a bit of stability to start to come in. By this point, a lot of the core of us have now, well, I say that lot of us, you know, I'm talking like four, five individuals, we sort of like have fully leaped and this is what we're doing. Steve Usher (03:02) Hmm. Colin (03:03) And there's not a lot of money, but there's enough money to know how you're going to pay your rent and an E and have some kind of sense of the life. And we felt like we haven't really got going yet. Yeah, I just pushed on and we made that happen. It was called Tunnel 228 and it was wild. Yeah, it's one of my favorite projects within the range of stuff I did on Punchdrunk and we managed to find a way of it getting sponsored and it was all done for free and it was the, it was definitely the height of Punchdrunk being, and again, still there's not a lot of social media, like there's, but there's a buzz around Punchdrunk in London and Steve Usher (03:43) Hmm. Colin (03:47) There were 15,000 tickets, 1,000 tickets a day for 15 days. And they were released two days before the thing was opened. And they all went like straight away. And it was so exciting. We'd kind of created that project. There was a little bit of a conversation with that project going on with street art culture because we were operating. in some spaces off Leek Street, which is a legal graffiti area in London, which had been set up by banks in the year before. And again, I bring a lot of what I know is because what I've learned. And I'm not a street artist. I've never really been involved in the culture, but I love street art culture and I love the accessibility of it as an art form. Steve Usher (04:18) Mm-hmm. Colin (04:33) both for people doing it and also for audiences like it's the most seen artwork because it's presented out on the street with no barrier. So I definitely kind of say for me personally, that's when actually it became harder to stay with fully engaged with the organization. The one thing I'm hugely proud of kind of post Sleep No More New York. We had the Drowned Man, which was a thing in itself, a big show in London. But then when Sleep No More China, when Sleep No More China appeared ⁓ as an opportunity, that was wild because it was like, do you, how do we take this thing that's really difficult to make even when everyone's speaking the same language? How on earth do we go and put this on in a totally different culture? Steve Usher (05:08) Amazing. Mmm. Colin (05:30) And also the thing that's fascinating in China is that because of the Cultural Revolution, you know, there is this whole period of time where the theatre scene and the art scene was decimated in China and there was no practice going on. And so the people that you work with... Steve Usher (05:48) interesting. Colin (05:51) are only one generation. don't, they weren't taught by anybody. There's no continuation of any knowledge. And so, you know, it's a particular kind of landscape we were trying to make work in. And it was amazing. I'm super proud. You know, it's 14 months of my life. trying to build relationships with the team in China and ultimately getting that show open. But around that time, that's where I started to actually be true to myself. And I actually started to realize what I needed to be doing to get out there every day. And it wasn't to just keep on servicing. what Punchdrunk needed, it was actually about music because music's my biggest passion. And when I started down this journey of getting involved in kind of experiential kind of immersive practice, it was about recontextualizing music and giving other, finding different ways to present music and find audiences to engage with music.