A 1600km walk through Norway to Denmark isn’t the usual pre-show routine for an actor, but for theatre maker Tom Bailey the journey was just as important as the show itself. Taking time out of a busy Edinburgh Fringe festival performance, Tom spoke to Nordic Watchlist’s Glen Pearce about the project.
Bailey, who is part of the theatre company Mechanimal, undertook the two-month journey from the Outer Hebrides to Norway and onto Helsingor in Denmark. In Helsingor, Bailey performed Mechanimal’s latest work Crap At Animals, an outdoor work exploring species loss and at-risk species.
As well as highlighting the increasing number of species on the ‘at risk’ register, the walking tour was an attempt to look at more sustainable ways of theatre touring. “There’s a lot of talk about that in the theatre industry right now about the impact of touring,” Bailey explains. “Traditionally you’ve had this kind of helicopter model of touring, just going with the show, flying off, day or whatever but with climate change, that’s coming under pressure.”
The route Bailey took follows the decreasing spread of Boreal forests across Scandinavia, their treeline spread receding further north each year due to the warming climate. For Bailey, that decline in forests has had a profound impact.
“It’s quite a depressing story and that influences my feeling about it,” says Bailey. “Actually, Norway is quite densely forested, and has a completely different social history, which I’m, to some extent, a bit blind to. It’s certainly not all virgin forests. It’s a lot of plantation forests, which look and feel very different to Scotland’s plantation forests.”
Throughout the walk through Norway to Denmark, Bailey wild-camped along the route, carrying not only his own gear, but also a large piece of fabric containing a list of 44,000 extinct and endangered species. It’s a list that has doubled in size since the pandemic, something Bailey and the Mechanimal team are keen to draw attention to.
“It’s exploring a list of extinct and endangered species that’s updated every year by scientific organisations,” explains Bailey. “It’s about putting the names of those species out there and finding lots of poetry and colour and play within the names and making a kind of, I guess, a poignant tragicomic show about that, but through a kind of medium of clown.”
It may not seem the most obvious subject for a theatre piece but, for Bailey, the novel approach of a two-month long walk is a key one for engaging audiences.
“I suppose to try and find different ways of talking about or exploring what’s going on the planet, on the planet right now, outside of the usual kind of ways that climate change information comes to us, which is often quite scary, quite data led, quite apocalyptic.”
“I think to engage people in fresh ways, we need to find fresh ways to talk about and explore these things. So that’s kind of what I do.”
Engaging with people was a key element of the process during Bailey’s mammoth walk.
“I suppose that nicheness and the weirdness of it kind of starts a conversation with people and it’s through those conversations that people want to see the list, explore the list.”
It was an interaction that developed during the walk “I wasn’t sure at the start how, how interpersonal I’d be with the list, whether or not it’d be like sharing with loads of people, getting people to write on it, but actually I found just getting the list out and letting it be in the landscape on its own and looking the most aesthetically beautiful, just shot in this way, and quite poignant.
“So, I suppose that was mostly how I displayed the list. But certainly, had lots and lots of, you know, fruitful conversations with people about the purpose of the walk, the meaning of it, why I’m doing what I’m doing. And, depending on people’s line of work or background or whatever, they’d, I guess they’d respond differently“.
Norway is often held up as a green utopia, spearheading environmental causes and green energy but it also has a conundrum, its huge national wealth is funded by the country’s oil reserves. For Bailey, that mix was an interesting one to explore.
“I met quite a lot of people who work in the oil industry who would become naturally quite defensive when I said what I was talking about. I wasn’t trying to be aggressive or anything, just be overt about a message to climate change.”
“I was aware though of the conflict to Norway’s soul is it’s got this wealth founded on oil but also such an amazing social philosophy of everyone has to have good access to nature, everyone should get out there.”
“I guess it’s trying to market itself as a kind of pioneer in the green field, but I suppose, the narrative around wealth growth is completely different to somewhere like the UK. For a lot of the last 200 years, Norway was at the end of say Swedish and Danish colonialism, and people were exceptionally poor. Then you suddenly get access to wealth in the last 50 years.”
“Certainly, that conflict between yeah, we’ve got all this money from this oil but the care for the environment is quite palpable.”
“Going back to that social side of it that oil wealth and that growth of wealth from oil hasn’t necessarily followed the same pattern as in say, the eastern states, where it all goes to the top, oligarchs. They’ve created this immense national welfare as a kind of social welfare net.”
The journey through Norway saw Bailey alone with his thoughts. “It was, quite lonely, quite a solitary walk, especially through Norway. I try and split it into loneliness and solitude. The more you can sink into solitude, which is where you’re alone and you’re in dialogue with things around you that are not human. So, I’d say I spent a lot of time in solitude, rather than loneliness.”
The international importance of climate change and its route through Scandinavia gave the piece a universal appeal but it does come with its own challenges.
“It’s a global issue. But starting with the list first, you’ve got a list that is predominantly in English,” he says.
“There’s a lot of very obscure and poetic and funny names for an English, well-speaking English audience. With audiences in Denmark, where the level of English is really high, it goes down fine, really nicely. In South Germany, with an older audience, we found that no one really got it due to language difficulties.”
“It’d be nice to take this outside of Europe. We’re doing that for the first time next year, we’re going to South America. But when I think about international, there’s also politics around what’s made it onto the list, not just in terms of like the languages, but the actual species that have made it onto the list.”
“There’s a priority of species, a priority of geographical area, you find that for some reason, there’s a bizarre weighting towards the study of grasshoppers in a region of East Africa.”
Despite the challenges of the long walk-through Norway, would Bailey do it again?
“Will I do a walk again. Would I do the same route again? Well, yes. The route was stunning. I’d probably take upgrades of kit. I’d probably take a slightly different route I would probably even go slower and take the landscape in more. I think trying to squeeze that much into two months. I was, you know, smashing out 30 kilometres a day.”
The call of Scandinavia has already hooked Tom Bailey. “I’m going to do another route next year, another journey from Lithuania to Sweden into Denmark. I really want to evolve the model of how I’m travelling and how I’m working with trees as I travel. And I want to find ways of making that twist the dial more towards the artistic, the artwork.”
“In the future one, I want it to be less about I’ve got to get somewhere, but more how can where I am inspire how I move and how I listen more closely to what the landscape is and how it’s asking me to travel, rather than just like make a beeline for it.”
Bailey peformed Mechanimal’s Crap At Animals as part of the Greenwich and Docklands Festival on 31 August and 1 September.
