By James Hadley in London
 
I recently attended a showing of work-in-progress at a big, airy rehearsal space in South West London called The Playground Studios. It's run by a collective of theatre practitioners as a creation space.

Creation space is one of those buzz words you hear bandied around increasingly these days, generally to suggest a space that is focussed on the creative process without the pressure to come up with an end product straight away as the business of most rehearsal spaces is geared towards.
 
Naturally there's a bit of an overlap there - many rehearsal spaces may claim to be creation spaces too. Venues like Battersea Arts Centre or the Shunt Vaults, with their focus on 'scratch' performances of work-in-progress, could claim to be creation spaces despite also presenting a lot of finished productions to public audiences.

The distinction with a space like The Playground Studios is that it's sole focus is on the development process of new work. The collective of artists, ranging from actors and directors to sound designers and choreographers, will regularly meet to share creative concepts and discuss ideas, then intermittently an amount of funding gained from hiring the space out to commercial hirers (including as a professional rehearsal space) will go up for bidding to finance a research and development period.

My understanding is that anyone in the collective who wants to will bid their creative concept and then everyone will vote on the ones they feel have the strongest potential. The winners will then get to use the funding and the space to workshop their ideas for a few days and then present them to an invited audience. The work doesn't necessarily have to be further developed into a full show from there though, as it may be decided that the project is valid as a process of experimentation and discovery in itself.
 
My visit to The Playground Studio was to see just such a showing. There were two work in progress showings being presented, but I was only in time to see the second of these, 'Working Title' directed by Caitriona McLaughlin. This was a promising work inspired by thinking around the hunger strikes in Northern Irish prisons. In particular it focussed on the way different modes of masculinity were shaped in such an environment, with scenes of bullying between prison guards - goading the 'nicest' of these to be 'more of a man' through beating one of the prisoners up, and of tenderness between a cleaner and a physically weak hunger striker, and a moment of intimacy between two inmates which becomes a little too intimate for one and winds up in a violent reproach.

The work had been developed through improvisation. There was a feeling of experimentation and innovation around the visual staging ideas of the piece, using moving screens being flipped around to define the different cramped quarters of the inmates. Scenes were presented around each other like loose pieces of a puzzle that had not yet been rearranged into an overall picture, but this randomness was attractive in itself. There were also some fragments of audio-visual projections over static actors - theatrical ideas which were very much in a developmental stage, divorced from context within a scene.
 
This sort of experimentation is what leads to fresh staging ideas and innovative material, yet within the time-pressured rehearsal room there's precious little time and space for this sort of process. Hence the great importance of a creation space where ideas can be played with bereft of the pressures to produce a product. In continental Europe there are increasing examples of this model being used, particularly when state funding values this sort of artistic exploration process as integral to the development of theatre as an artform (as opposed to purely mass entertainment).