Alice Boyd - actor, composer, environmentalist
The founder of Staging Change wants theatres to talk more openly about sustainability.
Hello again…
And welcome back to The Crush Bar, my fortnightly newsletter about theatre and the people that make it, arriving in your inbox every other Friday. You’ll find the second issue - a chat with the amazing Alice Boyd, plus a few bits and bobs - below. If you haven’t subscribed already, then please…
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Interview: Alice Boyd
Alice Boyd noticed something when she went to the Edinburgh Fringe in 2016: there were no recycling bins on the Royal Mile. Or at least none that were obvious to someone unfamiliar with the city.
“In fact, I found it very difficult to find any information on sustainability,” she says. “It didn’t seem like anyone was really talking about it. It really became an issue for me. I even ended up doing my dissertation on it. It was definitely something I wanted to try and tackle when I returned.”
In 2018, Boyd did exactly that. She launched Staging Change, a volunteer-led network of companies, venues, performers and theatremakers committed to making the performing arts a more eco-friendly industry. She started small, with a campaign that challenged shows to commit to reducing their plastic waste, recycling their flyers, and reusing their set, props and costumes.
The success of that campaign – over 100 companies and individuals signed up – encouraged Boyd to think bigger. At the 2019 Edinburgh Fringe, Staging Change ran workshops, panel discussions, and “sustainabili-teas”. There was even an award - The Staging Change Award – that guaranteed one sustainable show a slot at the 2020 VAULT Festival. The aim of it all, says Boyd, was to start a conversation.
“The issue is so urgent, and the best way to tackle it is to tackle it together…”
“I am not an expert,” she says. “I don’t have all the solutions. Staging Change is just a grassroots campaign that wants venues and companies to start thinking about how they can become more environmentally friendly, and to communicate with each other about it.”
“That communication is really important,” she continues. “I understand it can be scary, because solutions are so complex and mistakes will inevitably be made. But the issue is so urgent, and the best way to tackle it is to tackle it together. To talk about what does work and what doesn’t so others don’t have to make the same mistakes themselves. There is strength in numbers.”
Boyd was born in Brixton and grew up in rural Kent. She had two great loves as a child – performance and the natural world. As a teenager, her parents took her to both musical theatre groups and environmental events. As a student at Oxford University, she was both an active participant in student drama, and president of the climate society. It wasn’t until she graduated in 2018 – the summer she started Staging Change – that she thought she ought to pick a path.
“I felt I had to choose between going into the environmental sector, and going into the arts,” she explains. “So I left uni and started working nine-to-five for an environmental charity. But then a director asked me if I wanted to come on tour with a show, and I was like: “Yeah, I think I do, actually.” So I quit my job. It was scary at the time, but I’m really glad I did it.”
That was July 2019. Boyd is now 24 and attempting to construct a career that allows her to pursue both her passions. She acts with Poltergeist Theatre, the award-winning company of which she is a devising member. She creates environmental entertainment as one half of comedy drag duo Alan and Ron. She composes atmospheric electronic music for stage and screen. And she does all of that alongside her volunteer work with Staging Change.
“I enjoy organising stuff,” she says. “I enjoy projects and I enjoy variety. I like being able to move from thing to thing. I really struggled working nine-to-five. Going in to work at the same place every day really didn’t suit me.”
The show Boyd quit her job to perform in was Poltergeist’s Art Heist, which ran to acclaim at the 2019 Edinburgh Fringe. A comedy caper about cat-burglary, it confirmed the company’s reputation as theatremakers with a playful, gently provocative approach to making work.
“Genre – and playing around with genre – has been a big thing for us,” says Boyd. “We like to take something that is accessible and that people love – aliens, art heists – and build a fun story that hopefully anyone can enjoy. We are fundamentally quite silly and childish people, but we do like to lace in a bit of thinking as well.”
“We are fundamentally quite silly and childish people, but we do like to lace in a bit of thinking…”
Poltergeist formed as students at Oxford, brought together by artistic director Jack Bradfield, currently a resident director at Islington’s Almeida Theatre. Bradfield and Boyd had visited Edinburgh before – they took a student show to the festival in 2016, the year Boyd was shocked by the festival’s lack of sustainability – but it was in 2018 with devised piece Lights Over Tesco Car Park that they really made a mark.
What made that show stand out was its theatrical creativity. It used microphones, projections, audience participation and flying saucers (the sweet, not the spaceship) to construct a kind-of documentary-comedy about extra-terrestrial sightings. It also earned the company one of the New Diorama Theatre and Underbelly’s three Untapped Awards - a better venue, a better deal, a chunk of cash and plenty of marketing support for the following year’s festival.
Poltergeist used all that support to make Art Heist, which the company – with Boyd, freed from her nine-to-five – was planning to take on a post-Edinburgh tour in Spring 2020. That didn’t happen for obvious reasons, but some dates have been tentatively pencilled in for 2021 instead, and the group have started preparing for their third show while they wait.
“We are really interested in games and technology,” says Boyd. “Those things were integral to Art Heist, and in the future we really want to push them and see how central to the work Poltergeist does we can make them. At the moment, we are just kicking around ideas, but it’s quite exciting.”
Boyd, meanwhile, has used the sudden space and time she has found herself with to pursue projects connected with one of her other hats – the cap labelled composer. She created the score and sound design for both Lights Over Tesco Car Park and Art Heist – and consequently for several other fringe shows – but her individual ambitions tend in a different direction.
“I have never been so good with instruments – although I did almost get to grade three flute – so learning how to use software like Logic Pro and Ableton gave me a lot more freedom,” she says. “I got increasingly into electronic music at uni, and then into artists that use environmental indicators to make music.”
She cites American artist John Luther Adams’ work The Place Where You Go To Listen, which translates seismological and meteorological data from Alaska into an infinite electronic composition, and British musician Jason Singh’s work Plant Blindness, which converts bio-data from diseased flora into sounds, as inspirations.
“I want to challenge myself to think more about my practice and my journey. I want to make work for myself…”
“I have this new gizmo called a MIDI Sprout, which does the same thing, turning plant bio-emissions into musical notes,” Boyd says. “I’m still not 100% sure what bio-emissions are but it’s effectively the plant making music. I’m really excited to play around with it.”
It is the intersection of environmentalism and art that interests Boyd the musician. In 2019, she collaborated with filmmaker James Frederick Barrett on Crisis, a short audio-visual artwork created for the UN’s COP25 Climate Conference in Madrid. In 2020, she worked with writer Laura Grace Simpkins on Germinate, scoring Simpkins’ essay on lithium carbonate, the damage its extraction does to the environment, the importance of it in treating bipolar disorder, and the knotty, gnarly issues therein.
And last October, she was made part of Sound and Music’s New Voices, a development program and financial grant that she hopes will encourage her to start making music off her own bat, rather than in collaboration.
“I love working with other people, but I want to do more stuff that is led by me,” she says. “I want to challenge myself to think more about my practice and my journey. I want to make work for myself.”
Boyd’s plans for Staging Change in 2020 were put on hold by the pandemic. One thing is certain, though – when it returns, it will no longer be limited to the Edinburgh Fringe. Venues and companies from across the country have joined the network, from Vault Festival to the National Theatre of Wales.
And, although she accepts that improving their environmental credentials might not be a top priority for these organisations at the moment, Boyd thinks that doesn’t mean the industry can’t start contemplating progress.
“Lockdown has shown us all how important our surroundings are,” she says. “There has been this pause, and we now have the time – not necessarily paid time, granted – but we have the time to think about how we can change our practices going forward.”
“The most helpful thing someone could do for me is…”
Get in touch if you need a composer/sound designer for your project, whether it’s a show, a film/video or an audio piece.
I’m really keen to try and make more sound-led work about environmental issues, so if you’re a venue, any form of support (e.g. rehearsal or performance space) would be incredibly helpful.
Join the Staging Change network (it’s free). We have also run some workshops for theatre companies and artists, so if you’re interested in bringing more sustainability into your practice, we’d love to chat.
“If you want to get an idea of what I do…”
Check out Julie’s Bicycle. It is a London-based charity that supports the creative community to act on climate change and environmental sustainability. I listened to CEO Alison Tickell speak a few years ago, and she said something I won’t forget: “The arts is the difference between knowing knowledge and feeling knowledge.”
Listen to this playlist with some of my favourite artists/songs.
Follow climate club Adapt. My pal Rosa and I are such huge fans of graphic designers Josie and Richard, who run Adapt. We’ve been lucky enough to bring them on board as graphic designers for our drag duo Alan and Ron. I love the way they use comedy and colourful design to communicate the issue of climate change.
Bits and bobs, shouts and murmurs…
Ugly Bucket Theatre - the company run by last issue’s interviewee Grace Gallagher - are offering to showcase a film of their new show Good Grief for free to bereavement charities. So if you know anyone that might be interested, get in touch with them.
Remember One Night In Miami at the Donmar Warehouse in 2016? Well, now it’s a film on Amazon Prime, and there’s a great interview with writer Kemp Powers - who also co-directed Pixar’s Soul - here on WhatsOnStage.
Jason Farago’s NYT long-read about what Joe Biden can do to help the arts in America recover post-pandemic is fascinating - particularly the historical stuff about Roosevelt’s New Deal and the Works Progress Administration.
Sticking with America for a mo, the New York Post’s Michael Riedel has two books out about Broadway that look enormously fun reads. Mark Fisher has reviewed them here - and I’ve just ordered them online.
I was very sad to read about the closure of Corner Shop PR’s London branch last week. They were an amazing, efficient, and friendly team that made my job - and lots of other journalists’ jobs - a million times easier. PRs are vital to theatre and Corner Shop’s closure is a real worry. Lyn Gardner puts it very well here.
In case you didn’t know, I love love love Staged on BBC One. It’s all available on iPlayer now. Here’s a review. Here’s an interview with creator Simon Evans. And here’s me shutting up about it now.
See you in a fortnight…
That’s your lot for now. Thanks for making it this far. I’ll be sending out issue three in two weeks’ time - January 29th - but if you simply can’t wait that long, then feel free to get in touch. You can just reply to this email, or find me @FergusMorgan on Twitter.
I really hope you are enjoying reading The Crush Bar. If you are, it would mean the world to me if you forwarded it to a few people or shared it on social media. I’m almost at 500 subscribers, and I’d love to get there before I send out the next one…
Fergus x