Giants On The Hill

The Research Process:

As part of the research process Centric spoke to different communities to gain an understanding of their experiences and hear some first hand stories. This will help them as a company to understand what speaks to people and what truly connects with an audience. Hopefully as the show progresses we can use this knowledge and create a piece of work that is embedded in understanding and knowing what people want from it. Holding a space to have a discussion will allow people to talk about it freely and hopefully allow us to make a piece of work that explores some of that territory.

The work will be performed specifically in venues such as village hall; the reason for this is because wind turbines most commonly affect rural communities.

Also the fact that the work is specifically around this subject matter makes it more personal for the audiences.

We want to be able to reflect both sides but not cast an opinion and reveal a story that will give people the space to think about the issues at hand, consider it and come to their own conclusions.

The Play:

The play Giant on the Hill outlines the reality that when wind turbines are being brought to your neighborhood it can affect your community and those difficult decisions become ever more pressing. I have witnessed this with my friends who live next to a site that was marked for land based wind turbines and it caused big issues in the community. This is very similar to the issues outlined in the play itself, where friends and family go against each other. The nature of the work is there to raise the debate and encourage other people to have that debate also. With this being said, it would be dangerous for the actors to have a fixed opinion on these issues, as their aim is to provoke debate. To ensure the actors offer a balanced view the performance will be followed by question and answer sessions. Hopefully the audience will watch something that is imaginatively staged with characters that you care about and also situations that you care about, in the hopes that it would raise an interesting debate afterwards. The play explores these contributing factors and wants people to invest in the idea of this community and place that have been infected by these issues. Hopefully by watching the show the audience will begin to empathies with various characters and then they may even relate it people they know in their community, people that they may not have actually had empathy for in the reality. Potentially. The most interesting part of the play for me is it has the potential to go into the communities where this really is a pressing issue. I think this play could be really useful to allow people to step away from their actual situation and into to an imagined one that bares a lot of relation to the problems they have faced. It is the definition of theatre.