The Story
From its home in Cornwall, Kneehigh Theatre has built a reputation for creating vigorous and popular theatre for audiences throughout the UK and beyond. In Cornwall, 1980, a village school teacher began to run theatre workshops in his spare time. In due course a mixture of people became involved, a farmer, the sign writer from Tesco, several students, a thrash guitarist from a local band, an electrician. No actors…nobody who had been trained. The workshops took place in the spirit of cheerful anarchy and casually slipped into performance, and finally the production of shows.
There were no theatres or arts centres in Cornwall; Kneehigh created theatre for families in locations within their communities, village halls, marquees, harbour sides…and less conventional places. They created theatre on cliff-tops, in preaching pits and quarries, amongst gunpowder works and arsenic wastes, up trees, down holes, where the river meets the sea and where woodland footpaths end.
The company now finds itself celebrated as one of Britain’s most exciting touring theatre companies. We create vigorous, popular theatre for a broad spectrum of audiences, using a multi-talented group of performers, Director's, designers, sculptors, engineers, musicians and writers. We use a wide range of art forms and media as our ‘tool kit’ to make new and accessible forms of theatre. A spontaneous sense of risk and adventure produces extraordinary dramatic results. Themes are universal and local, epic and domestic.
Each year we commission new writing and devise and produce large scale outdoor and indoor international tours, small scale village tours, land and sea site specific theatre, installations and events. The company is now acknowledged as a defining theatrical force in the UK. Cornwall is our physical and spiritual home. We draw inspiration from its landscapes, history, people and culture.
Our rehearsal base is a National Trust barn on the cliffs near Mevagissey and our office is in Truro, the administrative centre of Cornwall. We take pride in our Cornish identity, and seek to inspire ‘pride of place’ in our Cornish audiences. Cornwall has a long and lively history of international trade and cultural exchange. For a county so distant from the capital, it boasts remarkably cosmopolitan and global influences and culture. We are proud to be an active part of this tradition.
