THE STORY OF PAL

Susan Benn, Founding Artistic Director

I had wanted to make a laboratory for artists and writers to explore and to make radical new work since the early 1960s. It wasn’t until 1986 that a confluence of life-changing events occurred to make it happen.

In 1985, my partner, Neil Wates, died very suddenly of cancer at the age of 53. Four months after his death, on the farm in Kent where we lived, one of his twin sons, then a student at Oxford and an aspiring songwriter, wrote a piece of music theatre to take to the Edinburgh Fringe that summer. Our tragic loss had left us all in shock and Rupert’s idea brought joy in a dark time. We got to work with a creative team to make the production.

By August forty young performers were busking our songs on the Royal Mile. A week of performances at the Pleasance attracted enthusiastic audiences and reviews. I invited John Faulkner, who was at that time responsible for the National Theatre Studio, (and who helped us to produce our musical in Edinburgh), to bring a NT Studio team to Kent to explore the idea of the farm as a ‘rural lung’ for developing new NT plays and music theatre projects.

While this idea was being considered, John sent me to the National Playwrights’ Conference in Eugene O’Neil’s old country house in Waterford Connecticut. For a month, I watched professional writers, actors and directors explore fragile early drafts of their scripts. Intense practical work took place out of the limelight and I began to understand the craft of courageous theatre-making for the first time.

I came back to Kent with a mission to make the farm a place where exceptional British talents, across a range of creative disciplines, could work together to create radical new work in film, theatre and opera.

A young novelist, Nicky Singer, who was also the Literature Officer at South East Arts, shared my passion for supporting new writing talent. Together we developed the idea, attracted interest and support from writers, formed a Board of Trustees to create a not-for-profit company, Performing Arts Labs, and raised seed funding of £15k from the Gulbenkian Foundation. From a tiny office in a cupboard in the ICA we went about raising more funds to produce our first three ten-day residential pilot Labs for nearly 70 British writers and performers between 1989 and 1991.

In those early years, through trial and error, the fundamentals of PAL’s approach were shaped by groups of dedicated Lab participants. We gathered intelligence from our growing talent networks and uncovered needs for new Lab programmes. We raised even more funding for two to three years’ work in each new field, testing our initial assumptions and creating a significant body of work to demonstrate the value of our process.

We attracted talented, experienced artists who, as Lab Directors, in turn attracted other artists, keen to explore their ideas with people whose ways of working were unfamiliar to them. “You can’t come to a PAL Lab to do what you do in your studio or at home”, we said. We discovered this experimental collaborative process worked best when driven by the passions and dynamics of the group. We created an environment of trust and generosity. We discovered that Lab results were tangible and always unexpected. Each Lab informed the next. Some of our participants began to receive national and international acclaim for work developed at our Labs.

We continued to gather intelligence and expertise, to grow our talent pool, to extend our reach through a widening range of partners and contexts, and to develop a sustainable funding base.

Twenty years on, PAL continues to make a unique and valued contribution to developing talent, projects and a robust creative economy in the UK and overseas.