We sat down with NONSTOP ahead of their show Pigs Fly Easy Ryan running at Iron Belly at Underbelly Cowgate from 31st July – 24th August. Tickets available here https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/pigs-fly-easy-ryan
What first inspired the concept for Pigs Fly Easy Ryan, and how did the idea evolve into a full production?
So many inspirations! For our sins, all of us have family spread across the globe, therefore we have this shared experience of spending a relatively high amount of time in the sky getting round to see them, to work, and occasionally to have a holiday. Airports and planes are endlessly interesting to us: all the hyper specific procedures you go through which are simultaneously quite high stakes (saving your life, allegedly), but then also quite ridiculous (pulling all your personal liquids out of a bag and putting them through an X-ray. Weird). After playing with these really bizarre and specific rituals surrounding air travel over and over, they started to become very alien to us and the physicality of them morphed into something very visceral and fleshy and pig like. Once pigs were on the scene, we took the idiom ‘pigs fly’, bent it until it broke and started to say something quite macabre about human ambition in relation to denying climate crisis.
The show explores themes of freedom, fantasy, and collapse—how did you balance the absurd and the sincere in your storytelling?
The kinds of shows we love the most are the ones that let absurdity and sincerity really blur into each other. It feels like most people we know are incredibly drained (if not devastated) by the turn that our political systems have been taking in the past year, and looking for a kind of escapism in response to that. We think this show allows audiences to have this really stupid kind of catharsis, whilst coaxing us all into a dialogue about some of the horrors happening, making the familiar strange so it’s easier to look at it with a new perspective.
You draw from airline culture in a surreal and erotic way—what kind of research or influences shaped that world?
Airline advertising is a goldmine! Right since the beginning, we’ve been watching these Pan Am airline TV adverts, with Pamela Anderson-esque models playing air-hostesses, prancing around beaches whilst they invite the customer to ‘fly me morning afternoon and night!’ Our show tugs on these pre-existing cultural threads pretty hard, inflating stereotypes that are already very close to the surface when we think about flight attendants. There’s also this amazing scene from ‘The Lair of the White Worm’ where Hugh Grant finds himself in a luxury jet apropos of nothing and then witnesses a sexy fight between an evil/dominant and a loving/caring flight attendant, and this absurd and heavy-handed metaphor in a film that had nothing to do with aviation gave us so much.
In terms of the language and politics of the world, we’ve become obsessed with Cute Accelerationism by Amy Ireland and Maya B. Kronic, which questions the possibility of taking our current state of omnipresent crisis seriously, and takes cuteness as a weapon and a tool to navigate technocapitalist dystopia and come out the other side with soft skin and smelling of roses.
Also, it’s kind of hot getting told what to do, so we got kind of into looking at safety demonstrations and the detail and reverence surrounding the safety paraphernalia. I’ll never look at a seatbelt the same way again.
Physical comedy and audience interaction are clearly central—how did you develop the show’s movement language and tone?
We got really excited by setting ourselves a challenge of undertaking ‘aviation experiments’ – code for ‘can we throw our bodies around/together to experience ascension, weightlessness and flight’. None of us are pro-circus trained (apart from Kendra our director, who has done some WILD tumbling stuff in their time), but we have not-so closeted dreams of being buff as hell stunt-men, so we’ve tried to push the limits of what’s possible in that camp.
NONSTOP describes the show as healing and cathartic—what has the creative process revealed to you personally or politically?
It’s hard to take yourself too seriously when you’re pretending to be pigs pretending to be airhostesses, and that is in itself a relief from the weight of the world we’ve all experienced in some way or another this past year. We had this meeting last week, where we were feeling overwhelmed by how much we had to get done before Edinburgh and our own personal lives to various degrees. Then we started going through sound cues, which included a barnyard club anthem and an oinking infused lap-dance track, and we just burst out laughing. We’ve created this world for ourselves where you can’t help but be a silly squealing pig inside of. Having these moments of relief are crucial for re-charging our batteries to get back into the heavier elements of this show, like unpacking the implications of authoritarian rhetoric on our conceptions of safety.
With such a chaotic and emotionally charged performance, how do you create a sense of connection and intimacy with your audience?
We like to think that the two pigs that the audience meet on this journey are, to some extent, relatable in their plights – whether that’s the desire to succeed, their desire to be loved, their desire to get sexy hundreds of miles up in the air but also maybe feeling a bit gross and burned out and beating themselves up for that. We want audiences to see themselves reflected in our pigs – and to take some kind of comfort from that as a result.