The Seance

Paschale Straiton is a Performer, Writer and Director.

As a devising performer she has a worked with a lot of companies performing in very different contexts: Opening Skinners Box, Improbable’s play about psychological experiments; The Enchanted Palace, a theatrical installation at Kensington Palace for Wildworks; Sturgeon Moon a project that visited communities along the River Severn with Desperate Men; Full Circle, a new outdoor project by Avanti Display, involving 2 people and 110 metal buckets. She wrote the script for the soundtrack for River Stories, a large scale spectacular production for Walk the Plank, has directed a children’s show for The Honk Project and is a regular puppetry director for the New Vic Theatre, Stoke on Trent.

She began performing on the street in 2000 and was instantly captured by the excitement of it – where anything can happen and a performer has to be alert and open to the element of surprise. She noticed that through performing on the street she could connect everyone, including people who don’t go to the theatre and people who were often marginalised. She learned to encourage people to join her, suspend their disbelief or think sideways about the world for a moment, or an hour, or longer, which often seemed to make people feel happy. And this made her feel happy too. So, she attempts to recreate this equation as often as possible.