Going native ... the hunting of the pig scene from Pilot Theatre's production of Lord of the Flies. Photograph: Tim Smith
Next Saturday Pilot Theatre company will have its biggest ever audience. Around 500,000 people around the world will be watching on TV as Pilot stages the opening ceremony of this year's International Indian Film Academy - Bollywood's equivalent of the Oscars. Yorkshire cities Hull, Sheffield, Leeds, York and Bradford beat off competition from many cities, including New York, to stage this years awards, and Pilot - a small Yorkshire-based theatre company best known for successfully enticing young audiences into the theatre with productions such as Lord of the Flies and a recent revival of Roy Williams Sing Yer Heart Out for the Lads - won itself the opening ceremony in the face of other bids.
It won because Pilot and artistic director Marcus Romer could offer something unique - a show that could genuinely meld cutting edge video graphics with live performance, including dance (directed by former Phoenix Dance artistic director Darshen Singh Bhuller), Bradford's Viva Aerial Artists and music: Ruby, the number one single from Leeds based band The Kaiser Chiefs, has been remixed by Johnny Kalsi from the Dhol Foundation together with Sandy Nuttgens.
Pilot's success in winning the opportunity to stage the three minute show with a budget of around £100,000 is interesting because it is an indicator that small companies are thinking big and outside the box of traditional work. Some might sneer that being involved in such projects is a distraction from the real work of making art, but actually, as Marcus Romer points out, the skills are often transferable. Some of the video graphic techniques used on Saturday night will pop up in September when Pilot premieres its latest show, Looking for JJ, a version of Anne Cassidy's compelling novel for teenagers about a child who kills another child.
In fact Pilot - perhaps because it often makes work with a particular appeal for the under twenty-fives - has always embraced new technologies rather more than most theatre practitioners. With Lord of the Flies a decade ago they were the first company to offer the programme in the form of a CD-Rom, and a trailer for Looking for JJ is not just available on YouTube, but the script has been up on the web allowing those interested to make comments and suggestions. These kind of developments are not peripheral to the show, but actually a crucial part of bringing it to new young audiences. Interestingly, the National Theatre's website is offering trailer videos of shows too - and the teenagers in my household have been playing the A Matter of Life and Death clip all weekend.
Pilot is by no means unique in its willingness to engage with new technologies both creatively and as a marketing tool. Katie Mitchell has been playing around with video at the National, and in the live art world such experiments are commonplace. Station House Opera has been undertaking some fascinating experiments. On the web, plays are being developed including a cyber version of Judith Adams' Sweet Fanny Adams with the aid of video company Fifty Nine - who have been working at the National with Katie Mitchell.
What I think Romer is on to is that the fact that theatre doesn't have to sacrifice its unique selling point - its liveness - to play with new technologies, and that it shouldn't try to be cinema. Instead, through engaging with others industries the theatre world can make discoveries about itself and ways of operating. He talks of being invited to a technology and entertainment conference in the US and meeting the technical director of Pixar who asked: "What are the challenges facing your industry, and what are you doing about it?" It is a really good question, and one that we could all ask ourselves. He went on to say that when Pixar sets out on projects, it often doesn't have the technology to complete them but they do it anyway because they know that it is the discoveries that happen along the way that often turn out to be the most interesting. When Pilot bid to be part of Saturday night's ceremony it was operating way outside its comfort zone. Who knows where it might lead.
