Tools for invention

The Paper Birds are a devising theatre company who were co-founded in 2003 as graduates of Bretton Hall, Leeds University. We began, as many graduate companies, devising shows in the daytime and waitressing at night-time to pay the bills. We loved making work together and had been given enough encouragement through our first show A Smile Fell in the Grass; which we took to the NSDF and the Edinburgh Fringe in 2003, to feel like the gamble of setting up our own company might just be worth it.

We spent the first few years of our practice making shows with a focus on form rather than content. We were sharpening our skills in storytelling and physical theatre and experimenting with acting and non-acting. At this point we didn't have a process as such, sometimes we would copy exercises we had read about as students, hoping the working methods of the greats such as Complicité, Pina Bausch or Forced Entertainment would lead us to create work as impactful and inspiring. Mainly though, we all just came to rehearsals with ideas, random props, pictures, pieces of music. We would all write sections of text and play with ways to stage these, or we would improvise around characters or themes and see where this took us.