Hiding in Plain Sight – The Making of ‘The Hide’ by Tilly Ingram Theatre

I was sat on a birdwatching boat in Poole Harbour when I first discovered that white-tailed eagles had returned, or rather had been reintroduced to England. 

It felt like a lost alien of our natural landscape, returning after over 200 years of absence.

They described this giant bird that cast this huge silhouette in the sky. I was mesmerised. There was something about these birds that captured me. They only lived a few miles down the road from me, and I could in theory see them at any given moment in my sky. 

There were two parts of the making process for me. First was the practicality of the piece, making the work accessible for both myself and the audience, and then the narrative of it, finding how to tell my own story as well as G463’s and represent the non-visible disabled community.  

I wanted to make outdoor art that can only really exist outside, and THE HiDE has to be outdoors because you can’t birdwatch indoors. My own disability means that getting cold or wet has a real negative impact on my health and so the whole piece became a challenge to make the work, but make it accessible for myself and audiences. I think a lot of my process in the early creation stages was about me travelling to festivals and trying to see as much work as possible.

Getting to see great work in the outdoor sector has inspired me, and improved my own art and practice, seeing what is possible and how much we can challenge the shape and form of performance as well as the audience. It also really affirmed how I wanted THE HiDE to exist, seeing all these performances absolutely exhausted me. I can’t stand for long periods of time and sometimes the festivals are really busy noisy spaces that you want to find a quiet sit down within. So when I was making THE HiDE I thought a lot about what I would want for my access as an audience member, well I’d like to sit down and in a bird hide its often benches so that’s both my seating and my set dressing. 

I chose to make THE HiDE a headphone performance because it created this sense of familiarity and community that I have experienced in both birdwatching and disabled communities. I wanted the piece to start conversations about this world of non-visible disability and chronic illness, so the gentle approach to these topics could mean that people would feel comfortable in talking to me after the show. I tried to replicate the quiet reflective atmosphere you get in a bird hide, with a focus on watching for birds as you listen to the piece. There’s a stillness and a peacefulness you can get from birdwatching but it’s mixed with a kind of attentiveness, ready to spot something new.  

Throughout the process of making THE HiDE I got to spend more time in bird hides, and I continually experienced this feeling of freedom from watching the birds.

The more I sat and watched the more it struck me how you can watch a bird but you can’t truly understand it. It’s only a portion of its habits you are  seeing. This became something I really wanted to explore in the piece, that feeling of seeing a fraction of the lives of both birds and people. These fractions of the bird’s life I was seeing really exemplified my own experiences of ableism, where people had made a judgement on me from a momentary glance.  

THE HiDE is rooted in my own lived experiences of both birdwatching but also non-visible disability, but I wanted to open the piece out so that others could relate to it. Sometimes in autobiographical work if you don’t have the same experiences as the performer it becomes hard to find yourself in that piece.

G463 became the mechanism and inspiration to widen my story out. I felt that his story as a disabled re-introduced white-tailed eagle could allow people to picture his experience even if they couldn’t picture mine. The story of an injured animal is one that is really common in nature documentaries, so using this established story meant I could create this empathy and understanding with the audience. This was something that I wanted people to think about in terms of non-visible disability, that sense of empathy and understanding, and giving  people a second glance.  

I hope that people leave the piece with a sense of awareness and excitement for all the things they might see as they look to the skies in their own area, at what might appear at any given moment.