Let’s get political

Tangled Feet began making outdoor work in 2008 after several years together as an ensemble carving a pretty traditional route through Edinburgh fringes and small-scale studio tours. Our first outdoor piece 'Home' was partly inspired by the creative challenge to make a work that could go absolutely anywhere, totally independent of any theatre or festival architecture, and partly out of frustration with the limitations of fringe studio spaces. We felt like we were meeting a very homogenous audience, that the spaces were often uninspiring, and the economic model of the fringe, particularly in London, was crucially flawed.

Our work always starts from a question or series of questions that we are mulling over in our lives, and this seems to place our work on a 'political' trajectory from the get-go. Home began as an inquiry into whether there is any human constant to the concept of what 'home' means. 2012's 'Inflation', an exploration of the financial crisis told on a bouncy castle, came from our struggle to truly understand the roots of the crash. And the large-scale finale piece we created this summer 'One Million' was borne out of our work with young people and the sheer unignorable scale of the problem of mass youth underemployment.

We have managed to find a poetic way to address political issues that is less confrontational than spoken text would be

We have evolved the belief that free, outdoor work is a really potent vehicle for exploring political concerns, and that there is a considerable appetite for it. Particularly in difficult times, public spaces call out to host political narratives, and those narratives leave their traces on the spaces and on people's memories of them. We have always been interested in storytelling in which ordinary people can see versions of themselves, their lives and their world played out as part of large-scale narratives. In One Million we included over 100 young people in mass sections of the show, essentially playing versions of themselves, delivering a cascade of CVs into a void, and later, when their hope has eroded, tumbling into industrial bins like unwanted refuse.

Making political outdoor work can mean treading a delicate line, as there is often nervousness by programmers and local authorities about the content. But perhaps because our work so often revolves around physical metaphors, we have managed to find a poetic way to address political issues that is less confrontational than spoken text would be, but which is (we hope) just as resonant and profound on a different level.

One of the other challenges of outdoor work is translating the fleeting connection you build with an audience into longer-term relationships. Tangled Streets is our attempt to try to create a digital platform which allows everyone – audience, participants and artists − to comment on and document the work. This begins to address the lack of critical analysis of outdoor work in the UK. Twitter is one way of gaining instant, if not very detailed, feedback on our work from those who liked it. Here are a couple of examples:

• @SalGoldsworthy: Thanks for ‪#onemillion ‪@tangledfeet great to see an outdoor show with political context and great young performance
• @TigersBride: amazing show ‪#onemillion by ‪@tangledfeet Spectacular and powerful. Young people in this country need a voice!

And of course there is the odd person who did not like it (or who disagrees with publicly funded art):

• ‪@chrisvcsefalvay: Thanks for the totally bloody pointless fireworks, ‪@tangledfeet. Nothing better to waste public money on? ‪#onemillion

Success feels very different in the outdoor world. You are not going to get a five-star review, names in lights, awards and a glamorous West-End transfer. It is much more likely to be a can of warm beer after the cast has helped de-rig scaffolding and load it into a van in the rain. But seeing a public space transformed and a story unfold feels like being part of a big, communal, ongoing investigation into what connects us as human beings. The unsuspecting person who stops in the street on their way to the supermarket and is captivated by something that changes the way they see the everyday world around them is a huge reward in itself.

Kat Joyce is Co-Artistic Director of Tangled Feet.
www.tangledfeet.com