Cultivating The Crop

As artistic director of PACT Centre for Performing Artists and director of the PACT ensemble for the last three years, Julie Vulcan is well attuned to what will be required of the artists coming through PACT's ensemble program: it's not a degree, or an extensive CV, but a commitment to collaboration, to the act of creation, in all its aspects.

“Because we're looking at making work from scratch and not necessarily from a play or from something that exists, we really encourage emerging artists from all fields to be involved,” Vulcan explains. “We find the more diverse their backgrounds the better, because they bring in so many rich ideas. It's a training ground for young emerging artists to learn how to develop work in a devised way.”

The ensemble program sees artists engaging in a five-month commitment, at first on weekends and later with an intensive week-long retreat which results in a work that is very much their own, the product of their collaboration and creativity, rather than the interpretation of an existing text.

“My background as a performance maker is very much from that devised approach, very much about responsive making, so to work with a bunch of really inspired and energetic young people, I love helping them see the threads of their ideas and taking them into a bigger place and helping see how they can expand and really flourish.”

Throughout the early stages of the ensemble, Vulcan provided the eight artists with a series of provocations and creative tasks, then collating their responses Vulcan tracked the common thread and proposed the theme and title for this incarnation of the PACT Ensemble's work: Harvest – an investigation of food, consumption and waste.

“Harvest is very much about – literal and metaphorical – what we harvest to eat and sustain us, but also what we harvest personally in our lives and what we leave behind in that sense,” says Vulcan. Eager to reflect this in all aspects of the production, the team has reached out to locals in order to assemble the show. “It's turned into quite a big production in lots of ways in so far as construction and set, but we're getting a lot of great help from creatives in the general public, so we've done a lot of call-outs for people interested in making certain recycled structures, so we're making a lot of great partnerships.”
Vulcan says that the most rewarding aspect of shows developed through devised collaboration is that it allows the artists of the ensemble to branch out from their own practices and engage holistically in every facet of the production, and this approach even goes as far as informing her directorial actions throughout development.

“I try and be as transparent in the process of direction so that they can learn from that also... Again, it's that matter of ownership. In this sort of practice my role is directorial when it comes down to the very end and I'm shaping it but I really see myself as a facilitator; I see how I can facilitate artists to really own their work. That for me is what's so rewarding.”