USING DRAMA AS A TEACHING TOOL - Reeling & Writhing

Reeling & Writhing
‘brilliant, ground-breaking theatre’
‘makes you feel the earth move a little under your feet’ Joyce MacMillan,
The Scotsman (Standing Wave)
Reeling & Writhing is a Glasgow based company founded
by joint artistic directors Katherine Morley and Tim
Nunn.
Our performances start from, or are immersed in, fine
text and beautiful words, through which the company
aims to inspire and educate.
Reeling & Writhing creates a magnetism between the
textual and the physical worlds of performance, to
exercise text and ingenuity, to employ music as much
as a physical dynamic and to find and embrace human
complexity.
Productions are often accompanied by an education or
community project, to allow access, and to encourage
people of all ages, colours and sizes to benefit from all
that the arts can offer.
We engage with people from all sectors of the community
in which we live, as our audience and as collaborating
artists.
Reeling & Writhing was born from the need to make
beautiful things.
Reeling & Writhing was founded by Katherine
Morley and Tim Nunn, who are committed to creating
theatre for a broad and new audience in
Scotland.
We are arts professionals with strong combined
experience and a history of working in Scotland
and throughout the UK. Katherine has been working
as a Glasgow-based theatre director and workshop
leader for 6 years, since the completion of
her research based MA. She has most recently
directed shows for the Tron Theatre, TAG, Grey
Coast and Reeling & Writhing. Tim moved to
Glasgow in February 2003 and has been busy at
the Centre for Contemporary Arts establishing
the Creative Lab and in various professional and
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voluntary positions for Scottish theatre. He has
always had a professional connection to the arts
but also worked for ten years as a human rights
campaigner including a term as director of the
Free Tibet Campaign.
In January 2004 we produced ‘White Lament’ – the
performance production for National Holocaust
Memorial Day commissioned by the Scottish
Executive.We worked with a young cast from East
Renfrewshire to create the show in workshop, ultimately
written by Tim and directed by Katherine.
The performance was very successfully shown to
an audience of politicians and business and community
leaders from all over Scotland.
After the success of ‘White Lament’ we were commissioned
by the Scottish Executive to write a five
chapter, cross-curricular teacher’s pack about The
Arts and The Holocaust. Entitled ‘The Arts and The
Holocaust. Lessons from the past for citizens of
today’ the pack was launched by Peter Peacock,
the Education Minister on Holocaust Memorial
Day 2005 and has been distributed to every
Secondary school in Scotland.
In between these two big education projects we
also produced a new mainstream play called
‘Standing Wave’ as a co-production with the Tron
Theatre, Glasgow. It told the story of Delia
Derbyshire, a talented electro-acoustic composer
who worked at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in
the 1960’s and was best known for arranging the
Dr.Who theme tune for its first broadcast series.
Our three week run of ‘Standing Wave’ in October
2004 received four star reviews from the Herald,
the Guardian, the Times, the Express, the Sunday
Herald and the Metro and a five star review from
the Scotsman.
A full company biography is detailed, with photographs,
on our website: www.reelingwrithing.com.