THE BROAD CLOTH
Co-produced by The Field Station and The Copenhagen Interpretation, The Broad Cloth is a groundbreaking transmedia playable theatre event spanning a network of over twenty island communities across the Nordic region and British Isles.
Somewhere in a cold sea is an archipelago of small islands, lit by the Midnight Sun in summer and the Northern Lights in winter. They say the oldest of these is Skylark Island - or Himmellærke Øy, if you're using the old language. The community of Skylark Island are shepherding and fishing folk, but everything revolves around their main industry: the traditional manufacture of a woollen textile called broadcloth.
You are invited to the traditional coming of age ceremony for Kai Skylark. Along the way, you will make discoveries about the island and her people, their traditions and beliefs, their hopes and fears. You will also encounter the unique challenges faced by those who live in isolation on an island. There are storms on the horizon: perhaps The Ancient Ones have their own plans for Kai’s journey…
The Copenhagen Interpretation
The Copenhagen Interpretation is a community-empowered, inclusive theatre process designed by Jenifer Toksvig to create transformative story-world experiences, encouraging artistic and reflective response from participants.
We aim to provide comfortable and collectively supportive environments that can be accessed through many cultural portals, such as crafts or music, as well as via fields like science or academia.
The extent, duration, and type of participation is defined by each participant, from moment to moment. They are invited to do anything from quietly bearing witness, to sharing knowledge and discussing ideas, to creatively contributing to the building and exploring of a fictional world around a central story.
The experience takes place across a choice of analogue, digital, and live performance platforms, using a development of Harrison Owen’s Open Space Technology to give participants agency over their own experience and access support needs. It's designed to be particularly accessible for neurodiversity.
Our projects invite engagement around key social themes including:
- Accessibility and inclusivity within cultural engagement, with a focus on neurodivergence
- Cultural exchange and shared resources
- Grassroots approaches to environmental stewardship
- Heritage craft and folk traditions
- Wellbeing through collective cultural engagement
- The balance of heritage conservation and future community sustainability
- Innovation in models of community-led governance
- The flow and recognition of value within collective experience
The Open Space Process
The Copenhagen Interpretation uses a development of Harrison Owen's Open Space Technology. The principles are essentially an observation of what happens in real life anyway. They allow us to exist in the moment, follow our natural instincts and energies, and let go of the idea we should do certain things or be a certain way. The agency afforded to participants by this process enables far broader accessibility for a wide range of access support needs, and in particular for the neurodiverse.
Open Space also allows us to have agency over our participation in the work, and makes the work fully participant-empowered. The building blocks of any gathering are the people who are there, in the state they are in: energy, availability, focus, intention, passion.
The substance of this whole process is who we are, what we bring, and what we do with that. The outcome will be who we are and what we have when we emerge.
Our developed Open Space principles:
- Whatever brings you there, and whatever you bring, are the right things
- Whatever happens is the only thing that could have happened
- Wherever you get involved is the right place
- Whenever it starts for you is the right time
- It’s over when it’s over for you
There are also some specific freedoms represented metaphorically:
The Law of Freedom - you are free to be where you choose to be, doing what you choose to do.
The Butterfly - transformation, hovering, being open to receiving, being beautiful just being you
The Bumblebee - cross-pollination, maneuverability, healthy ecosystem
The Bluebird - the hopeful pursuit of happiness
The Network
The Broad Cloth is an accessible storytelling journey that is woven by community, and weaves communities together across a network of around 20 Nordic and British coastal islands.
Through theatre, art, craft, music, community gathering, and the sharing of local wisdom, we will collectively imagine Skylark Island, a small fictional island and its community, inspired by the culture and history of each host island and its way of life.
We are effectively laying a transparency of the fictional island over different real islands, to see what Skylark Island looks like when it is imagined into being with the unique aspects of each different island, and to find the common places where we are all interconnected.
That is specifically why we have chosen to connect up a network of island communities, who will perhaps understand the fictional island’s sense of isolation from their main governance, and the experience of being separated from easily accessed resources.
More than understanding the challenges, though, we want to celebrate the unique culture and heritage of our coastal communities, and come together for mutual support and shared resources.
Each island will create its own bespoke and authentic production of this story, within which we can explore the key themes listed above, in particular the friction caused when the future makes demands on tradition that it might not be able to accommodate without changing.
There will be ways to get involved in person and also online. We expect the project to run for many years and intend to leave a legacy in the network of islands, and their organisations, community groups, and artists.
Accompanying
During their experience of a Copenhagen Interpretation project, participants can be accompanied by someone whose role is to support that experience in whatever way is most helpful to that participant. This can include:
- professional access support workers (eg: sign language translators)
- informal support workers (eg: a friend who makes the participant feel more comfortable attending)
- a group of participants intentionally supporting each other through the experience, equipped with tools and awareness we provide for mindful companionship
