This material was documented in an informal sharing at the Roundhouse at the end of a period of studio based physical research between June – July 2025 as part of the development of A Fairy Tale.
In June I did four workshops with students aged 12-15 at Orchard Park High School in Croydon. We shared memories, which we described as being attached to a strong feeling and discussed why we thought we might have remembered this particular experience, has it taught us something about ourselves or our world?
In groups we transformed a selection of these memories into Angela Carter style fairy tales, using magic realism to affect their outcomes and we used these new stories to create movement. In this process we explored using our imagination to engage with fantasy. We felt that this gave us a way to access our ideas and explore our dreams, it felt like an exercise in hope and it made us feel powerful and positive about the things we could achieve.
Click here to listen to Alessia and Maria explaining the process in their own words. The Butterfly Story was used to create movement in the workshop at the Roundhouse and is towards the end of the video.
I took this learning along with the stories created by the young people into a five-day workshop with the 2025 graduates from the National Centre for Circus Arts at the Roundhouse. We went through the same process as the young people and we thought a lot about the function of memory and the role of myth and fairy tales within our society.
This documented material builds on a two-day workshop with the same NCCA students in July 2024 at Sadler’s Wells where we imagined ourselves to be a collection of lost people who have chosen to dissociate from society. They had traded their memories for a place in this world between worlds and now their strange stories – a mix of the personal and familiar popular fairy tale had become their reality.
I am interested as memory as data – in that we remember things to teach us something. I see a connection between that and the cultural function of myth and fairy tale to explain things that we did not yet have the scientific knowledge to understand. In this period of research we began to explore the change in the way we currently access and use fantasy in the development of self and society. Our tether to technology feels like it isolates us in an insta/filtered/AI unreality, a negative and uncertain place where we struggle to understand what is real.
In the process used in this period of research we found that what Angela Carter demonstrated by subverting fairy tales was that the exploration of fantasy can be a powerful tool for voicing our ideas, emotional needs and building hope.
This material was directed by Ella Robson Guilfoyle and devised in collaboration with: Tessa Stockwell, Tomás Rojas, Xélia Froidevaux, Chrys Shipley, Willow Hippely, Ellie Beale, Ania Giannattasio, Ruby Buchanan and the students of Orchard Park High School.
Production Manager: Laura Sprake
Filmed at the Backstage Studio at the Roundhouse by Fionn Guilfoyle.
This period of research was made possible with thanks to Kate Brower, Jack Allet and Lyal Stephens at the Roundhouse and Victoria Ongley and staff and students at Orchard Park High School Croydon.