Still Here, Still Making Theatre, Still Working

 
robbiemcgovan@nwkcollege.ac.uk
Artistic Director
 
I personally would like to bring a tortoise onto the stage, turn it into a racehorse, then into a hat, a song, a dragon and a fountain of water. One can dare anything in the theatre and it is the place where one dares the least.
 

The Miskin, our house, is open but intimate, theatre is about possession and the Miskin is possessed. It’s possessed by the work we make and by the extraordinary energies that the companies of  actors, dancers, designers, musicians, technicians and directors bring to the place and leave behind them when they move on. The Miskin is about the work and that is about the artists who make the work. 18 years since I came to set up the Miskin, I am still learning, I am still working towards finishing what I set out to do and I am still realising that I need to find out more.

We work in a total environment, everything you see and hear has been designed, created by a team of artists and technicians. Nothing is there that hasn’t been built and formed from an inspired idea, nothing is there that hasn’t come from someone’s heart, head and hand.

The Miskin is a real theatre, a real opportunity for a shared experience and as such is a real centre of educational  and artistic excellence.

I am influenced and inspired by many things, many people, many events,


educators lke

Jerome Brunner,

""The school boy learning acting is an actor,

and it is easier for him to learn acting behaving like an actor than doing something else",


practitioners like

Meyerhold,

"Actors work to all intents starts after the premier.

I believe that a performance is never ready in premier.

And that is not because we didn’t have the time to, but because it matures only in front of the audience",


and

Antonin Artaud,

'The human face is an empty power,

a field of death ...
... after countless thousands of years
that the human face has spoken
and breathed
one still has the impression
that it hasn't even begun to
say what it is and what it knows.'


and

Augusto Boal,

"now is the moment to build barriers,

to build walls and to fight against intolerance,

against racism, sexism and globalisation,

to fight vigorously against that. 

And to re-unite people."

"'The important thing about emotion is what it signifies.

We cannot talk about emotion without reason

or, conversely, about reason without emotion;

the former is chaos, the latter pure abstraction"


and

Noam Chomsky

"Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it's from Neptune."


but most of all I am inspired by the young people I work with, the work they can create when they believe they can take risks and be heard and that they have stories to tell which should be listened to.


"I hear and I forget
I see and I remember
I do and I understand"


Some people look at the Miskin and express confusion, is it an education, is it a theatre? Well. I am confused by their confusion, it’s obvious really, it’s a glorious, creative, educative, whole, it is true theatre, it is real education.

Robbie