Camden People’s Theatre’s SPRINT Festival returns with a packed programme throughout March. London’s “best-established carnival of new and unusual theatre” features artists with bold ideas, artists who don’t play by the rules, and artists, in many instances, making their first professional work.
This is the first of a series of interviews highlighting artists and work within the Festival, as I chat with Benji Paget about their show, BOGGIN.
“What if the VHS spat itself back out, the boogyman strangled us with the tape and sent us down the river? BOGGIN aims to help us navigate this low road.””
Where: Camden People’s Theatre, Basement.
When: 4 Mar, 9pm.
Ticket link: https://cptheatre.co.uk/whatson/BOGGIN
Your experimental show BOGGIN is showing at SPRINT as a work in progress. What can you tell us about it?
It’s an experimental, semi-autobiographical performance piece that combines themes of family memories with creatures of Scottish Folklore, all while being anchored by a story recently passed down to me about my great uncle’s expedition to Abbai in Ethiopia.
It features lots of physical theatre, object manipulation, puppetry and live art elements. One of which is experimental noise/sound, which is used to create a score live on stage during the performance, with Riley Hamshaw-Mills at the helm.
It’s not your everyday, run-of-the-mill play that’s for sure.
How did you start off in the business?
Originally, I had a music background, but I have transitioned over time to performance. Since graduating from doing Drama and Theatre Arts at university, I’ve just been really driven to continue making stuff.
Initially, I started out workshopping and trying to produce some performances I had worked on in university. From there, I moved to producing a DIY cabaret night (which I still do) around London.
Inspired by colleagues, I started to experiment and focus on more live art elements of performance, such as installation pieces, which subsequently got picked up and taken to Manchester, Norwich and around London.
Which then leads me to now with BOGGIN, my working attempt at making a full-length show.
How did you develop this show, and how did you get into Scottish folklore?
The idea for BOGGIN originated from some workshops I participated in last year, run by Peter Case in partnership with a NY theatre company La MaMa. Both were performance investigations experimenting with creatures that took place in bodies of water. One was in the Thames River in Kingston, the other in the sea at Brighton Beach.
From there, I kept having the idea to make a creature with a head made of shells, a distorted being. When I got passed the story of my Great Uncle from my Granny, things just started to connect until the idea for BOGGIN was born.
Developing the show has been and continues to be a collaborative process with everyone involved in the workshopping process; that’s just how I like to make stuff. We had some help early on from TRAMSHED, who allowed us to test some stuff for the performance in an audience environment as part of their Generator program.
Being Scottish, I had a small idea about elements of Scottish folklore, but I never had much interest; however, recently I’ve been inspired to research them more, not just from the creature workshops but from artists of other mediums such as Danielle Macleod and Morvern Graham (I recommend checking out their work).
Your show brings elements from Ethiopia together with experimental sound – how do you make sure all these influences come together?
A lot of trial and error. In rehearsal, we experiment with different structures and ideas and just play around with them until they feel right. I am very blessed to be collaborating with people like Riley, who are multi-faceted and can draw on lots of different experiences.
Having a through line like the music and the story for my uncle’s expedition at the centre, really helps bring all the different elements together.
Recently, I have been struggling to find someone to do some lines in Amharic (the national language of Ethiopia), but I have hope.
What’s next for you?
Aside from the continuing development of the show, we have plans to take it to Norwich in April and Brighton Fringe on the 31st of May, with the hope of taking it to Manchester, the Camden Fringe and Scotland.
Outside BOGGIN, I’ve been getting into experimental sound myself and am planning a Live Art Sound installation with musicians across Norfolk, creating a continuous soundscape for a whole day.