Hawkwood – Matter and the immaterial

By Dr Maria Oshodi, Extant Artistic Director & CEO.

What is the Matter?

It is that in 1998, Blind and partially sighted theatre practitioners, Liam O’Carroll, Damien O’Connor, Maria Oshodi and Liz Porter journeyed to the West Country, having the year before, recently formed the experimental performance research group, Extant. We went to stay at Hawkwood, an educational centre overlooking the Stroud valley in Gloucestershire, which was central to Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophical movement. Hawkwood had been recommended to us by a eurythmy practitioner, who we were about to work with. Eurythmy is a movement practice evolved by Steiner that relates to the spaces in-between objects; something, among many practices, that we were interested to explore as part of our performance access research.

Congregating and living and working together at Hawkwood for several days at a time became a familiar stress free, productive pattern for the group in the early years. During this phase we were joined by other visually impaired performing artists Janee Hall, Mandy Redvers Rowe, Neil Payne, John Godard, Tim Gebbles and Mike Taylor for various foundational blocks of practice development. It is no wonder then that the first professional production and national and international tour mounted by the company, Resistance in 2005, was based on the autobiography of Jacques Lusseyran, ‘And There Was Light’. In this he tells of how he was blinded in an accident at the age of 8, became a teenage member of the French Resistance during WWII, was betrayed, captured and subsequently interrogated by Nazi SS officers, leading to his final incarceration in Buchenwald concentration camp.

Resistance unfolds through a tense nonlinear narrative, to reveal these facts, but the action also flicks between time, perceptions and perspectives, to uncover the deep mystery at its heart, of a deeper perceptual awareness of the world. This discovery that Jacques describes through gaining blindness, and he describes, was also informed by the teachings of Rudolf Steiner. Peter Brook visited Extant during our rehearsals, so impressed was he with the Lusseyran story.  This moment felt as surreal  as it sounds, as the theatrical deity stepped down from Mount Olympus to join us in our South Norwood youth theatre rehearsal space.  However  we learnt that this type of occurrence was part of the magic of entering the sphere of Lusseyran. Not long after Peter Brook’s visit, we received a fax from Martin Scorsese New York office informing us about an option they had on the autobiography, which would prohibit our tour, but we managed to negotiate a workaround with this Goliath to complete the production.

More Matter…

Almost 20 years on, in 2023, following a couple of decades of accumulation and establishment of theatrical visually impaired Extant praxis, I decided it was time to academically document this work from the inside. I set out then on a journey undertaking a PhD by Public Works. This type of PhD is given 18 months to complete, as the public works, in this case four Extant productions, are the research to which the written commentary is applied. Resistance was not one of the selected productions, instead others were, created in the decade 2010 – 2020. Having last been in university prevaricating in the 90’s, I felt very rusty now, and spent the first three months going around in prevaricating circles, trying to discover how to start writing, confused about what was required exactly, what half the terminology used in the online seminars meant, feeling overwhelmed in supervisor meetings, and making false starts with angles on the work, that I found eventually over complicated my direction. Finally, I became unpetrified by instigating some regular career coaching sessions, along with diverting to an external deadline, which was to write a chapter for the UCL ‘Beyond the Visual’ book publication. Using this as a rehearsal for draft 1 of my first case-study, I was off the block and finally writing, reading, and applying theories to further chapter one drafts and to my introduction, which were submitted within the next three months for the PhD stage one review.

However, just as I had found my footing and had mapped out a writing schedule that would get me through the remaining year (writing three more chapters and creating a bespoke website), much as many research students experience, I was flung into a supervision crisis. My supervising team collapsed into a sink hole which had been forming in the middle of the Middlesex University faculty. Now the Summer ahead would not only be intensive literature reading, shaping and drafting chapters, it would be doing this with no proper supervision in place, making formal complaints through the University’s systems, researching what alternative replacement supervision might be necessary, reinstating access provision for year two, while continuing to carry out an executive role at Extant.

Back in 2021, undertaking this PhD had been my brainchild, when facing another Arts Council England National Portfolio application process, and being aware that my time in this role of AD and CEO which I’d occupied from the start, was finite. The creation of Extant, the idea of which had come to me in the back of a cab in 1996 in response to surviving the trauma of touring in a co-production between Basic Theatre Company and Graeae, now needed to change. I proposed to our board that the company completely shift course and apply to repurpose our resources in the review and evaluation of company efficacy, training of the next generation of visually impaired arts leadership, and the start of archiving our practice. So here I was, in 2024, having achieved the sea-change I had proposed and funding to support it, a tad overwhelmed in juggling it all! However, all the years of training in producing uncharted experimental theatre, came in handy now, when facing these doctorial challenges…don’t budge, keep turning up to work, hold the intent strong, commitment clear, and the blocks will eventually give way  to emergent progress…and so, the supervisory team did reform, I was granted a six-month extension and completed two drafts of all chapters plus the conclusion by Easter 2025. Pulling all my chapters together into one document, must have been how Brunel felt putting up the suspension bridge. While supervisors then read it through for more comments, I turned to building the interactive strand of the research, a dedicated website that links through from the thesis to hold digital archival materials, that illustrate Extant performance practice, historic context, reporting evidence and  theoretical arguments. Locating, selecting and making accessible all this mostly uncompiled data, that was scattered across a range of abandoned hard drives, different computers and Sharepoints, was an entire project, and took a web designer, content formatter and a research assistant to back me up in completing it. Eventually in June 2025 both the thesis and site were ready, and the only time I cried in the whole 2-year process was on my read through of everything on the morning of submission…I then hit ‘send’, and it was in.

The next time I engaged with the work was four months later when I picked up  to revise, two weeks before my viva at the end of October 2025, the long academic summer vacation having fallen in-between. My examiners, based in different countries, attended online for the October viva, but I elected to be in person on site at the University where my supervisor and chair also convened. Though I had taken copious notes throughout my revision in the lead up, throughout the 90 minutes of presenting and defending my work I didn’t refer to the notes once, so engaged and rehearsed was I. The two examiners attention, focus and interrogation, together with their appreciation and regard of the work, felt such a culmination of validating acknowledgement. Then I left the room so the examiners could confer, and when I was called back in, this feeling was sealed with a pass! Though conditional on some minor corrections, to be completed within 6 months, I left the university building and campus a changed person. As my supervisor, access worker and I scuffed our way through blankets of crisp fallen leaves on the streets of North London on that chill dark October evening, it would have been easy to mix up this exit with similar ones from undergraduate tutorials of yester year, apart from the fundamental difference that I was now Dr Maria Oshodi. I could not have predicted at the start of this research odyssey, what an immediate flip of perspective this moment would offer. Having been shrouded by the burden of work, this had now slipped away, to reveal a status which had been forming underneath, that I had now earned the right to wear.  As we raised celebratory G/T’s at the Greyhound pub near campus, me, being one in the past who would reject mention of honours, instead, this title, I could shamelessly claim as my own and positively glory in.

What’s the Immaterial?

It’s that, early in 2026, whilst in the middle of my thesis corrections, Extant once again returned to Hawkwood. This meant a pause on finessing my doctoral research, to engage in a broader company review called Collective Dreaming. Now, 28 years later, Extant’s return to Hawkwood was a very different structure in the form of Operations Director, Ian Abbott, Trainee Artistic Director, Tam Gilbert, Artist Development Manager, Louisa Sanfey, external evaluator Chloe Todd-Fordham and me, Artistic Director, being joined by five visually impaired ‘dreamers’, Claire Baines, Amelia Cavallo, Priya Commander, Stephen Hilton and Ashar Smith. The intention behind this four-day gathering is documented (*here – blog post coming soon) , but the wormhole into which I was pulled on my return to Hawkwood, is not. Something of Steiner’s ‘the spaces in-between objects’ alluded to earlier, felt part of the force behind this, or rather to be more accurate,  the ‘spacetime in-between’. While the dreamers warmed up with lively drama exercises, sat together in long discussion sessions, and even led us outdoors to connect with nature by burning negative ideas in a fire pit, guided us through a spiralling maze, and gave gratitude by drinking from Hawkwood’s spring water well, something else was happening. I felt past and future converge, hearing echoes of the voices from the Extant past and feeling the presence of Tim, Damien, Liz and John along with collaborators Eileen and Carmel…faded memories returning of events during weeks spent years ago developing work and discovering our practice. This space in Gloucestershire has witnessed through time what the objects of Extant were, became, and now what the potential future shape of them might be. In-between has been a silent energetic force of intention that propelled us then, and now was infusing the intergenerational Dreamers. As their many ideas, desires and actions were emerging in the main house at Hawkwood, all moving towards exciting Extant reinvention, I took a walk down the long interior road that cuts through  fields, leading to the end of the property. I was told that there is a large sign by the gate there, something I never knew existed before; a blind thing that makes matter sometimes immaterial. Tracing with my hands the letters carved deep into the old wood, Hawkwood physically became materially present after all this time, however with this I understood that it really has been the immaterial power of the place that continues the process that is Extant.

Dr Maria Oshodi, Extant Artistic Director & CEO May 2026