We sat down with Tilly Ingram, the author The Hide. Presented with the support of Without Walls, Tilly Ingram’s The Hide invites audiences into a poetic exploration of sanctuary, connection, and the untamed spaces between us
What first drew you to connect your own lived experience of a non-visible disability with the story of G463, the disabled White-Tailed Eagle?
I started to get back into birdwatching in my local area of Poole Harbour and I was on a birdwatching boat cruise where I saw G463. He’s actually the first White-Tailed Eagle I’ve ever seen, and I heard about his story from the Birds of Poole Harbour team on the cruise. Then, I saw a call out for the ‘Soup and a Story’ commission by Activate Performing Arts to be part of InsideOut Dorset 2023. The brief was to tell a story of the local landscape, and it would be performed on a rewilding site, Bere Regis. I thought back to G463, and the white-tailed eagles reintroduction. It felt like a perfect match to tell a re-wilding story about a disabled eagle that lives in Dorset. My work is always inspired by nature and my own experiences as a disabled woman and I was struck by the sort of parallel I could draw between us. Whilst it feels a bit strange to connect our stories, especially as G463 has a visible disability in his talon loss, I feel that, with autobiographical work, it can help to find another point of connection for the audience that may not have experienced disability as a way to broaden out my personal story. As I joke about in the show, it’s a story about disabled bird by a disabled bird.
The Hide invites audiences into stillness and attentiveness — why do you feel slowness and observation are important tools for storytelling?
I want to create the atmosphere of a bird hide for my audience members. When you are birdwatching, you have to be observant for the smallest changes around you. It’s easy to walk into a hide and think there is nothing there, so you have to embrace the act of observing. Theres a meticulousness to surveying a landscape or habitat, and that lends itself to a slowness. The main thing I ask of my audience is to look again and look deeper at people and places. So I use slowness and stillness to show my audience, especially those who might never have birdwatched before, how they might do this.
Birdwatching often requires patience and trust in the unseen; how does that metaphor speak to the hidden realities of disability?
Part of the joy of birdwatching, for me, is you might see nothing. There’s always a risk of failure, and you have to retrain your mind that going and sitting in nature is what you are there for, any birds you see are a bonus. There are birds there, you just haven’t seen them. It’s an act of patience and trust, which is part of being empathetic. For my own experience that would be trusting that I am disabled, even if you cannot see it, but for others that empathy might be around their mental health or grief. We all have something going on beneath the surface and you don’t always have to see it for it to exist.
What discoveries did you make about yourself, or your relationship with nature, while creating this piece?
Nature always inspires me, I grew up quite rurally which I loved and I think whilst making this piece I found myself appreciating finding nature in more urban spaces or more in our everyday lives. For birdwatchers, there’s an emphasis on rarity, but, through the process of the show, I started to see more and more all the urban birdlife that exists in our lives. Where the show is often performed on high streets I started to watch pigeons more and more, and I realised how often they are disabled too but they still thrive. When performing in these spaces I often guide the audience to watch the gulls or pigeons, watching their little movements and journeys and hopefully making them realise there is actually nature all around us. I want them to take as much care for the pigeons as I do for the White-Tailed Eagles, and feel that we aren’t outside of nature but part of it. Finding nature in urban spaces and cherishing it hopefully leads to more audience members taking more responsibility for wildlife.
Outdoor performance brings art into public spaces — how does that openness affect the way audiences receive a work as intimate as The Hide?
The joy of outdoor work is that people stumble upon it. I think theres something really fun when people come across The Hide during the performance. There’s a little bird hide with all the audience looking away from it with their binoculars and headphones, in their own little world, staring up at a tree or a church. It must look like the weirdest silent disco ever. I think this adds to The Hide’s intimacy, all the audience can hear is my voice and the story while we are usually looking at busy high streets or parks, there’s this little bubble we create. I think to me thats why it’s so important that the end of the show is filled with birdsong and people can take their time to come out of the world we’ve created.
The openness allows for those that have never birdwatched before to give it a go and get a flavour of it. The intimacy creates a sense of ‘birdwatching experience’ for them to try, even though they’re on a busy high street.
What do you hope people will carry with them after spending time in The Hide?
I hope people carry a bit of the joy of birdwatching, people often come up and say ‘oh I must get some binoculars’, and that makes me really happy. But I also hope that people can take that feeling of calm and focus, one that gives people the space to think about how we look at people and spaces around us with a kind of patience and generosity. I also hope it makes people think again if they see someone like me sitting in a disabled space on a train.
Booked tickets for the show today! https://www.festivalofthrift.co.uk/performances/the-hide/