ABOUT SUE MACLAINE COMPANY
Sue MacLaine Company creates highly original performances that provoke and move in equal measure, developing a performance language that utilises functional forms of access to build and illuminate the creative intent of the work.
The company converges finely crafted trans-personal, poetic scripts written by MacLaine with choreographic practice, and places both within a striking visual aesthetic. Form and content are of equal importance and the audience experience, the contract between audience and performance is a significant and vital part of the work's meaning.
Our work is of varying scale, performed within traditional stage/performer/audience configurations as well as in visual art studios, museums and community spaces such as village halls.
The core company members are Sue MacLaine and Executive Director Jane McMorrow. All productions begin with a script written by MacLaine and creative collaborators are then engaged dependent on the needs of the production. These include choreographer Seke Chimutengwende, set & lighting designer Ben Pacey, sound designer Owen Crouch, digital artist Giles Thacker, costume designer Holly Murray and, to date, performers Nadia Nadarajah, Tess Agus, Kailing Fu, Karlina-Grace Paseda and Angela Clerkin.
Sue has an ongoing creative relationship with Jonathan Burrows who assists in dramaturgical conception and manifestation and Mark Schofield for marketing/communications/audience development.
The company is subsidised by project funding from Arts Council England, box office income, grants from trusts and foundations. We aim to pay our collaborators within ITC guidelines and work in a way that allows each collaborator to manifest their best self.
SUE MACLAINE, ARTISTIC DIRECTOR
Sue MacLaine's work is radical, political, personal and poetic. Her writing is informed by her interest in the function of memory and the role of history and is particularly inspired by a quote from Les Lieux de Memoire by Pierre Nora,
“to decipher what we are in the light of what we are no longer”
Sue began her theatre career in 1983 after leaving the New College of Speech & Drama (now Middlesex University). She joined Feminist theatre collective Scarlet Harlets in 1984 and made five works with them before leaving to join Kenneth Branagh's Renaissance Theatre Company.
She returned to theatre-making in 1999 after having qualified as a British Sign Language/English interpreter at Bristol University. She offers mentoring, dramaturgical support and direction to others with a particular interest in working with choreographers and dancers and continues to specialise in performance interpreting.
Having been offered a full scholarship Sue has embarked on a three-year practice-as-research PhD in the Literature, Film and Theatre Studies department at the University of Essex.