Guest Post: Theatre Re’s Artistic Director Guillaume Pigé On 15 Years Of THE NATURE OF FORGETTING

This autumn marks Theatre Re’s 15th anniversary and ten years since the premiere of The Nature of Forgetting.

It is quite rare to be given the privilege of spending so much time with a single piece of work, returning to it again and again to question it, challenge it and enrich it through encounters with new performers, collaborators and audiences across the world. I am only realising now how much that restless process of exploration and refinement has shaped Theatre Re’s performance language. We would not be the company we are today without The Nature of Forgetting.

Ten years ago, we had just been offered our first real home at The Point in Eastleigh. We had made three shows, and this new piece represented a significant step up: six performers on stage, a larger set, more than one musician… We wanted to become a mid-scale touring company. We were still searching for what made us distinctive, both in the work we made and in the way we trained.

Over those ten years, we have learnt to be more precise, articulate and specific. Each new collaboration has challenged us to look again at what we do and why we do it. Passing the piece on to other performers means questioning something we might have come to take for granted. Why this movement? Why now? Why do we stop? Why do we move again?

Those questions have found their way into our training, helping us move beyond our deep commitment to form. Technical excellence alone was not enough to make the theatre we wanted to make: direct, powerful, emotional theatre.

Through constant work on The Nature of Forgetting, we became interested in how technique and spontaneity work together: how to craft an impulse, rehearse while improvising, and keep discovering within something carefully composed.

Living with the piece has taught us that precision creates freedom. The more clearly we understand a physical score and its relationship with music, light and space, the more freedom we have to play within it. A performer can, and must, return to the same sequence hundreds of times and still find something unexpected.

That freedom also comes from constantly giving ourselves something to overcome. Creating always more difficult and intricate physical tasks has become part of our way forward. These ongoing challenges can give rise to rich theatrical material and renew our playfulness. By making scores more complex and demanding, we create obstacles that allow the imagination to emerge through the performers’ attempts to overcome them. The effort is real, the commitment is true and the focus is present.

We have come to understand that, in our work, a movement or an action can be there before we fully understand it. Our task is to find the question to which it is the answer. Returning to the piece with new collaborators keeps those questions alive. Every new performer makes sense of the score’s physical logic for themselves. Every musician finds their place within its rhythms. Every sound technician finds their own balance. Every relighter finds their own breath. Every audience brings its own history. The structure has become increasingly precise, while the experience within it continues to grow and change. These precious discoveries inform the way we approach the rest of our repertoire, create new work and develop our training.

As we celebrate 15 years of Theatre Re, I hope audiences can feel some of that history in the bodies, music and images on stage, and enjoy encountering The Nature of Forgetting at this particular moment in its life: a piece that continues to grow and change through the sweat of the people who bring it to life.

The Nature of Forgetting is on a UK and international tour until 4 March 2027