boat-house-theatre was a three day micro-festival, installation and performance occurring in a fishing boat located on Stockton High Street during April 2019. The piece was made in collaboration with Tom Adams and commissioned by ARC Theatre Stockton and Tees Rediscovered. It was a response to the vanished houseboat community of Greasham Creek, an area of the Tees estuary between Stockton-on-Tees and Hartlepool.

This was our proposal, and we managed to do most of it!

We propose constructing a replica house-boat in a public location in Stockton over the course of two weeks, involving local residents and trades, that will act as both a remembrance of the Greatham Creek houseboats and also as a performance space for a two day micro-festival.

The building of the house boat will be a performative act – with Tom and Dan arriving pulling the boat hull, two itinerant artists looking for a temporary home – as we begin building the act of working will be an invitation to the community help and become involved, generating conversation, recollection and commentary that we will document and which will form part of a weekend of performances in the boat-house-theatre at the end of the building process, centered around scratch works develop by Tom and Dan.

Details

boat-house-theatre will be designed by RL-A (http://www.rl-a.co.uk), Margate-based architects who have a fascination for unusual and speculative forms of architecture. It will consist of a simple box structure built onto the boat hull, which will then be clad in recycled materials to mimic the aesthetic of the original house boats.  RL-A envisage the basic build of the internal performance space to take two to three days, with the remaining ten days being taken up with cladding and more decorative aspects.  It will be during this time that we will hold making workshops where visitors can contribute to the project.

We would look to employ a local carpenter to act as lead builder for the project.  Stockton residents would be encouraged, via local media, to donate wood and materials, and we would hold making workshops over the two weeks where people can join in and help us.  We would facilitate conversations during these workshops, which we would record, gathering a makeshift oral history of the project and stories about the original house boats in Greatham Creek during the last century.

Once the structure is complete it will open for a weekend as boat-house-theatre for a number of micro-performances, including scratch works developed by Tom and Dan over the course of the project, as well as shows and events by Stockton-based performers and organisers who we encounter during the building stage of the project.  The programme will include talks and spaces for play – fishing clubs, quizzes, arm-wrestling etc.