Director Nathan Curry talks to Naima Khan about the challenges of directing a play on scaffolding.
"Don't let go! Just hold on for now.” I don't imagine this to be the most reassuring advice to get from a director while you're dangling precariously from the top of some scaffolding, but the performers in Tangled Feet's physical theatre performance don't bat an eyelid. 
Through what looks like an ordinary patio door, I'm led inside to the bright rehearsal rooms for the abstractly titled All That is Solid Melts into Air. “It's OK, we always seem to have lots of people in the rehearsal room who aren't actually making the show,” says Nathan Curry, so I don't feel completely out of place. And surprisingly, neither does he: this isn't the first time Nathan's directed a show on scaffolding. In 2009 he co-directed a theatre show for a nightclub crowd performed at height in a warehouse, and now he's working on a short piece with co-director Kat Joyce, to run at Greenwich and Docklands International Festival. In a huge former distillery, he talks me through the challenges of directing such a large-scale show.
“We looked at urban regeneration, which is principally where scaffolding is used,” he says.“It's a usual thing in our landscape - you walk past it everyday, but it's not until something different happens that you notice it. If you see someone in a fluorescent jacket walking on scaffolding, you don't think anything but if you see someone in a dress, you start to notice it and it takes on a different image.”
In a physical theatre show about the regeneration of the Greenwich and Docklands area, it's the music, the design and the movement that tell the story.
“Nick Gill, is the composer, and before we started we gave him four eras to work with so the music change goes from '40s to '80s which is quite distinct. Design is really import, the performers will wear layers and take clothes off as the show goes on. Another really important thing is colour. The colours during the war are very different from, say, the '70s.”
“Activity and movement vary over the time periods. We look at what people do and how they interact. The war was very much about community spirit, looking after each other, working together for a common purpose. But the eighties are a much more individualist decade with much more isolated types of movement. There's a bit in the show where I imagine the performers are climbing up Canary Wharf, making money on their way up, they get to the top and then they fall off. That's quite easy to read in a rehearsal room but when you take the show outside there's a lot to contend with and it's difficult to create a focus.”
“And everything is very fast-paced. We look at the '60s, and meet a war veteran living on a housing estate, then over the course of a few minutes, that turns into the bankers arriving in the eighties and people's houses being put up for sale. I want to have them dangling at that point.”
All That is Solid Melts into Air runs as part of Greenwich and Docklands International Festival from 24th June, and it's free.
Images by Alex Brenner
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