"How to make a Shepherd's Pie"

Dr Hugh Sillitoe
Huge Sillytoe

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We were overjoyed to have performance scholar Dr Hugh Sillitoe join us to close this fourth counterfield series. Huge, a large, daft, shape-shifting toe, ushered us into the wonderfully topsy-turvy, absurdist-anarchist, (non)sensical performance “How to make a shepherd’s pie”. Step by step they facilitated participants to connect with their inner shepherds and through a combination of collaborative vocal improvisations, collective storytelling and other exercises from Theatre of the Oppressed, to follow their own instructions on how to make a shepherd’s pie. Hugh & Huge mesmerised us with the ways in which they tactfully led us to undermine internalised notions of “an exact way to make a shepherd’s pie” so we could playfully disregard all recipes and create our own unique ways of making pie. The many unforeseeable steps of transgressive pie performance as political intervention were both remarkably generative and deliciously disruptive!  

Fabienne Formosa