Marc Rees
I am a Wales-based interdisciplinary theatre maker with an established track record of creating groundbreaking, provocative and risk-taking place-based projects across the globe. These multi-platform works include commissions from National Theatre Wales (three projects), the Cultural Olympiad 2012, 14-18 NOW, 2018 and UNBOXED, 2022.
The bedrock of my practice incorporates forms of social investigation and archival research. I explore a site (be it a building, a street or an entire town) to unearth details about its history. I then spend extended periods talking to inhabitants or former workers, poring through archives and opening up doors which may have been closed for years. Transformation then occurs through the redemption of these abandoned spaces and the redeployment of disused objects and materials.
I then take these findings – the facts, anecdotes, stories, images and characters I discover to create composite portraits of those places that audiences then encounter as an immersive experience consisting of installation, film, sound, permaculture, protest and performance.
Creator, curator, enabler and mentor
My approach can be compared to that of an archaeologist – exhuming the multi-layered history of a site, unearthing fragments of fossil of fact or fiction. I then examine these findings in detail and collaborate with artists, performers and the community to deduce, interpret and re-imagine.
Image – Jon Pountney