Destinations Plymouth

In November of 2023, the Arts Institute at Plymouth University invited Outlandish Theatre to bring Destinations to the University’s House Theatre. The piece was originally co-created by Maud Hendricks, Oli Ryan, and James Hosty, with staff and clients of Martha Whiteway Day Hospital, MISA (Mercer's institute for Successful Aging) in Dublin. Previously performed in the unit itself, this iteration brought Hendricks and Hosty’s choreography into a hybrid form online with Dermot Reilly, the lead clinical nurse manager at the Martha Whiteway, and in-theatre  with Oli Ryan, the sound designer.

The score is built out of individual recollections of journeys, holidays, childhood memories, provided during guided audio workshops by service-users of the Martha Whiteway Day Hospital and created into a sonic experience of stuttering half-remembered images, strong sensorial evocations and actions that help to remember but also distance the past. In terms of adapting these stories into an actable form, this successful interdisciplinary performance exquisitely fillets moments of connection or confusion and stitches them alongside the service-users’ fear and joy. The apparatus of care is conjured by Hosty and Ryan’s costumes and replicated by the seamless insertion of the sound technology into the performance, rolling on a hospital trolley between moments and gestures that Hendricks skillfully animates. The energetic ebbs and flows of her performance are carefully held within the theatre space, which echoes that of the day hospital; cocooned with hats and arms and curtain, the piece’s movements, sounds, rituals and actions choreograph the everyday performance of care.

For this performance in Plymouth a local care-giver and theatre practitioner, Judy Preston from the University of St Mark and St John (Marjons University), created a performance which drew on her skills from working in a residential home in activating and recording memories with the service-users. Her movements with and alongside Henricks, Hosty and Ryan spliced in additional notes to the score, and her careful circumnavigation or occasional trespass across the stage at times seemed to add a thrum of comfort or, conversely, anxiety to the building rhythm. She developed this score in response to cues developed by OT with Dermot Reilly, and his own performance and monitoring on stage through the zoom-link provided an additional observer, kindly but unsettling within the space.

This third iteration of Destinations offered the chance to mirror Dermot Reilly’s expertise at the Martha Whiteway Day Hospital in Plymouth’s Professor Ian Sherriff’s dementia research at the Peninsula Medical School. These threads were developed in a question-and-answer session with the audience after the performance and elements of the piece were examined in light of experiences in both settings and anecdotes from the frontline of this research. Following performances at the Whiteway Day Hospital, and in Sligo it was great to see Outlandish Theatre Platform expand the dramaturgical potential of this piece in a black box performance space, to see the striking visual imagery animated with light, with space, with the ability to be on- and offstage. This increased spatiality, despite its definite edges and light and dark, for me paradoxically extended the work beyond the hospital-life of the service-users and deeper into their lived experiences.