Paula Crutchlow has played a pivotal role in my development as a storyteller over the last ten or so years. We first met her as the dramaturg on the show Hunting the Giant’s Daugher and then asked her back for the show Dreaming the Night Field. Our conversation took place in the garden of the Felin Uchaf Centre on the Llŷn Peninsula in North Wales. Felin Uchaf in an important place for the Dreaming the Night Field team because it was one of the places where the spade work was done for the show. It was from there that we went on site visits; worked on our improvisation and blending our artforms of story, song and music; ate, drank and discussed together and even forged a spear and threw it through a rock!

In this discussion we ranged far and wide and talked about…

• How the two shows Hunting the Giant’s Daughter and Dreaming the Night Field are different in approach and style

• The nature of magic in Dreaming the Night Field

• The relationship between teller, audience, place and space

• Paula’s ways of working on the material and with performers

• The importance of making a real spear and using it with intention

• How human made things are wedged into the world and in to our telling and presentation of the story

• The urgency of re-establishing our connection with all things

Watch a video of the making of Dreaming the Night Field

Read more about how plastic are changing our world and bodies.

Luckily we had a few minutes to reflect what we had talked about after the main interview. In just six minutes we talked about…

• The inclusion of non ‘natural’ objects in Dreaming the Night Field

• Uncontrolled and harmful human intrusion into the world

• What we have to learn from Thomas Hardy’s granny

• Stories happen in the present tense

• The intimate connection of landscape and story

Paula is based in Exeter and works in the evolving fields of storytelling performance and interactive digital media. She curates and runs events with Scare the Horses and Blind Ditch.

All the Monday Mabinogi interviews can be found on this site by clicking here, or on of the following podcasting links Apple Podcasts Spotify Buzzsprout Stitcher.