Director sheds light on Dark Horse’s methods

The recourse to a Plan B came after the artistic director of Huddersfield’s Dark Horse theatre company popped into rehearsals earlier in the day. Watching the actors perform a particularly poignant section from new show Harvest, she noticed five minutes of action had disappeared.

It’s the kind of thing which happens when your cast of seven all have Down’s Syndrome and as a result have no concept of time or much interest in the power of the pregnant pause.

“They were going through a really dramatic scene where one character walks off stage to discover something quite momentous. The actor raced through it. He was no sooner off stage than he’d come back on. The problem is that counting doesn’t work, so you have to do what I call reinventing action. When we I see them tomorrow, we’ll make the character interact with two of the others before he leaves the stage and that way it will buy us a time. Every production throws up some new challenge, but it’s what I love about working here. It keeps you fresh and vital.”

Vanessa joined the company in 2008 when it was known as Full Body and the Voice and Harvest looks set to be another powerful piece from a company which is determined not to be pigeon-holed.

In the midst of a terrorist attack, central character September runs away from her domineering partner. Left to wander the scorched earth, when she eventually finds another group of post-apocalyptic survivors it seems like a new start, but September’s past is never far behind. While it’s Vanessa who writes and directs, like many of the company’s previous performances, the show is the result of much collaboration.

“Our aim was to scare and thrill the audience and we explore the theme of our shows in an incredible amount of detail,” she says.

“One day we went for a trip out to the wind turbines near to Emley Moor. It feels like quite a desolate spot and we were running around howling like wolves. It’s not what you expect to come across if you are out walking your dog, but it’s a vital part of the process.

“Harvest took three days, but before that point I’d thought about and done an awful lot of research into the characters. The hard work had already been done.”

While much at Dark Horse is the same as any theatre company, the background of the actors means the rehearsal process has to be different.

“Trying to explain very complex concepts is difficult. However, everyone knows how it feels to be really scared, elated or anxious, so I try to pare everything back to basic emotions,” says Vanessa.

“Even before I worked here, I had come to realise that language can act as a barrier to real emotion. When you have a show whose focus is physical movement and depth of feeling, it’s really quite liberating.

“Our actors don’t sit round with cups of tea talking about character motivation and I know that will be music to the ears of many other directors.”

Set up in 1998 as a social care project for people with learning disabilities, the company has, since Vanessa’s appointment four years ago, moved increasingly towards producing their own work rather than collaboration with established theatres.

They’ve also worked hard to raise the profile of their talented ensemble, which paid off last year when they featured in an episode of the television series Shameless. “Historically, learning disabled characters have always existed on the periphery and our aim has always been to change that,” says Vanessa. “Shameless was perfect. I’m sure there were some who didn’t think it was a good idea, but the people who spoke to us about it were really positive. It showed learning disabled characters with just the same quirks as everyone else and, best off all, for the first time I can ever remember they had genuinely funny lines.”

Harvest hopes to build on those ambitions and as the first production since the name change from Full Body and the Voice, it marks something of a new chapter.

“People often mistook us for a slimming club and a lot of our actors struggled with the pronunciation,” says Vanessa. “Given we are about enabling people, it seemed a bit of irony that our name was causing them problems.

“One day I started looking through a website of idioms and stumbled across Dark Horse. Straight away, it felt right.

“The dictionary definition is ‘person about whom little is known, especially one with extraordinary abilities and talents’. We couldn’t have found a more perfect name.”