Please welcome to The Clearing - to talk about Improbable's "The Gathering" (amongst other things) Matilda Leyser from Improbable Theatre.
A Special Episode of "The Good Listening To" where Improbable's "The Gathering" meets The Good Listening To's "The Clearing"!
Matilda is Associate Director of the world renowned and much admired Improbable Theatre.
She is a Theatre Maker and Director also of "Mothers Who Make" - which is all about "making work - even in the midsts of mothering..."
Matilda was a Circus Arialist for 10 years before coming down to Earth (with an elaborate flourish I'll wager) to become Associate Director of Improbable.
Her adventure continues in the Quest - alongside her two Co-Directors Phelim McDermott & Lee Simpson - to find a new Spiritual home and Creative & Artistic Hub for Improbable - in a journey called "The Gathering".
More about Matilda:
"Matilda Leyser, known to one Registrar at least as Linnet McDermott, is a colourful yet complex character, with an endearing hesitation sometimes when she speaks. Let’s consider her complexity.
Matilda has an MA in European Classical Drama. She has been diagnosed with inter-generational post traumatic stress disorder. Her parents’ ages were a generation apart and their parents’ own stories are truth at least as distressing as fiction. Matilda’s two children have both been identified with diversive neurology.
Matilda’s mother, the former Oxford student who married a professor old enough to be her father, used to say that Matilda herself was born scared. She used to climb the ewe tree in their garden and then became an aerialist in order to rationalise her fear of a life that other people apparently found so easy.
Now Matilda writes - and rewrites - as a practice to help her find relief. Many years ago as the youngest member of an eccentric academic family, Matilda took on the curious role of a tomboy who loved books, a tomboy who asked to do ballet classes - until she discovered a more free form of dance called contact improvisation. Then after 10 years as an aerialist, clinging tightly to the rope, Matilda landed up at the Improbable Theatre in a show called, appropriately, PANIC! Here she played a nymph. Her husband to be was the great God Pan.
The rest, she says, is history. Now an associate director of the Improbable Theatre Company, Matilda is looking for a home for this extraordinary creative enterprise, which has survived and thrived for around a quarter of a century until now, living on the road and on its wits.
Matilda appreciates the fact that her personal and professional lives are now totally integrated in everything she does - in the Improbable Theatre Company, in the idea of the Gathering, in Mothers Who Make, in her writing - and rewriting.
She is not constrained by convention but instead inspired by writers like Lynda Barry, Natalie Gold
Tune in next week for more stories of 'Distinction & Genius' from The Good Listening To Show 'Clearing'. If you would like to be my Guest too then you can find out HOW via the different 'series strands' at 'The Good Listening To Show' website.
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