Expect the unexpected

Punchdrunk began because I was doing a drama degree and going to see lots of theatre, and realised that a lot of work out there is self-indulgent and that the paying customers – the audience – were almost being forgotten about. I wanted to find a way to place the audience at the heart of the action. I also found that a lot of work was so passive – we're only using a small percentage of our brains when our bodies are inactive. Common sense dictates that when you're physically present, so much more of your sensory awareness and adrenaline kicks in, and you have to be more focused. I wanted to think about how you can apply that to theatre, how you physically hurtle the audience into the action.

"I wanted to find a way to place the audience at the heart of the action..."

So Punchdrunk started as a series of experiments, from university onwards, around how to empower the audience within a theatrical framework. It was a very organic process; I didn't set out to build a theatre company, I just wanted to make work. The best advice I ever got was at university: “Don't talk about it, don't hypothesise about it. Do it.” Punchdrunk was just the vehicle for that – it didn't even have a name in the early days.

The ethos is exactly the same now as it was then. Everything we're striving for, the goals are the same. We're still trying to find ways to empower the audience. There's been a need to professionalise, to create a better working environment for cast and crew. The live/work balance is always a tough one when you're making theatre, and I suppose it's about the shift from it being a hobby to a job, but the guiding ethos hasn't changed.

So many of my peers at university wanted to set up a company, and it was all about coming up with a company name, getting a telephone line and finding a little office, not about the work they wanted to make. It's so easy to talk about it, but the advice is just do it, do it, do it. You only learn by making mistakes. I'm a real advocate of making errors – the more errors you make the better, because you'll grow so much faster that way.

It might sound a bit ridiculous, but audiences should expect the unexpected. We're always trying to think about audiences' preconceptions coming into a show and flip that – there's always a point in the process where we think, what would the audience imagine happening next? Let's do the opposite. On the whole, we do large-scale, installation based theatrical adventuring, where you as an audience member craft your own route, your own journey across a cinematic landscape. We encourage you to break every rule you had growing up, everything you're told about theatre and museums and entertainment...

"The advice is just do it, do it, do it. You only learn by making mistakes. The more errors you make the better, because you'll grow so much faster that way."

We've always been on the fringes because we don't have a neat package for theatrical consumption, which gives us a healthy push towards having to innovate. As soon as we settle into what we're doing and start to replicate the formula, we stagnate creatively. I think it's good, it forces us to think, to take risks. It's so easy to settle back and think “phew, we know what we're doing now”, and that's kind of theatrical suicide.

The fact that audiences have different experiences is a critical mechanic of our shows. If everyone saw the same show, you'd lose the sense of the journey and the personal. We want people to feel that they've owned their story, that you leave wanting to tell people your story of what you saw. If everyone sees everything then we might as well be doing it in a traditional theatre and that's not what we're trying to do. We want discrepancy, we want the audience to have to work for it! It's designed so that the harder you work and the more you seek out, the more you'll find. As a by-product of that, if you don't work hard enough you might not see enough and you might have a frustrating experience. But that says a lot about your attitude as an audience member and a member of the general public – how you play your lot.

"We encourage you to break every rule you had growing up, everything you're told about theatre and museums and entertainment..."

Our audience is a real cross-section of ardent theatregoers, and people who go the movies and never go to theatre at all. There isn't a set demographic, we get a whole range of ages and backgrounds. What we're trying to do is get audiences to rediscover the childlike sense of adventure... that sense of being in a space and doing something you're not quite allowed to. No matter how old you are, you can always find that place.

Design is a critical part of our work. People often ask, which comes first, the world or the story, and probably it is the world first. The world contains so many stories, but if you doubt the world then everything else falls down. So, for us, it's about depth and the minutiae. Everything you can see, anything you can touch, has to be real. Anything that wakes you up, any chink of light coming through, anything that reminds you that you're in the twenty-first century, anything that takes you out of the dream, is terrible and to be avoided at all costs.

It's about having so much detail... you're filling in all the gaps, providing more environment and more aesthetics than your brain can take in. The way we work with designers is that our team put in a huge amount of work, but it's on a micro-level – little message written on postcards hidden behind mirrors. Something you might miss completely, but it's there, and it gives the world that sense of depth, a sense that it's lived in, that this world is a breathing organism.

"It's so easy to settle back and think “phew, we know what we're doing now”, and that's kind of theatrical suicide."

To successfully stage one of our shows abroad is a lot of hard work. We have to find a building. We can't tour conventionally; each show takes at least three months of installation to get a building ready. Taking a show abroad takes people who have the confidence and the guts to do something inherently risky, to play the long game.

What's exciting is that the less familiar [experimental work] is, the more impact it's going to have. People are always creating something new, something that wakes people up from the monotony of everyday life. We can have whatever we want on the internet, a couple of clicks away, whatever our heart desires. But when something is real, it's tangible, it's tactile, it's offering something that's almost analogue in a digital world. That feels relevant to today. A place, a city, that doesn't normally have this sort of work, or a place that's very traditional, it has potentially far more to give. And that's why I want to go these places. For us, a new audience which hasn't seen this stuff before is our absolute target. I want to go anywhere that's got a nice big empty building!

The British Council really helped us to get to this stage. We're very grateful to the BC for having the vision to see the benefits in this kind of work. Meeting a different set of practitioners, who aren't doing similar work to you, is always fulfilling, and it's wonderful to be able to take the work and show it an audience which isn't used to it. It's only through their feedback that we grow as a company.

Felix Barrett is Artistic Director of Punchdrunk, one of the British Council's selected companies. He was talking to Eleanor Turney. Follow Punchdrunk on Twitter @PunchDrunkUK, follow Eleanor on twitter @eleanorturney, and follow @UKTheatreDance for updates on all the latest news, opportunities and blogs from the British Council Theatre and Dance team.