As a born and raised Capetonian, and being based in the CBD for the past year, I like to think that I know my city back to front. I might not be able to direct you very well, but if you give me a landmark I can find you and the 5 closest corner stores to you.

When Baked Shakespeare invited us to interview them before their show at The Outlore Base last year, my bragging rights came into question. Sure I knew Hout Street, but I had never heard of this place before. And when I found the address, I barely recognised the nondescript black gate that led up a flight of stairs to the Base itself.

Yet again the Mother City had chosen to surprise me with a hidden gem, and along I went down (or rather, up) the rabbit hole to discover a new world of activity, a creative hub which opens its doors to all and sundry to experience performance art as you could not conceive before.

After following The Outlore Base on Instagram, when I officially met Liam on my second visit to the intimate venue (and after a shoutout from Laura in the Smokeshow interview), I locked in a chance to learn more about the dynamic duo behind the operation.

Liam Gillespie, a choreographer and dancer by trade, and Kimberley Buckle, writer, director, and theatre maker sat down with us to tell us more about The Outlore Theatre company and how their search for a space to flourish led to nurturing a space for creatives of all kinds to gather.

So I found out about this venue when we came to interview Baked Shakespeare, which to be fair was my first experience with theatre in general. From my chat with them and with Laura from Smokeshow, it struck me that The Outlore is more than just a venue. For the uninitiated like me, what exactly is The Outlore base, and how did it come about?

Liam: “So Kim and I go way back, back to college days where she helped me put on my first show in my third year of college and she had just graduated. . It was a Halloween idea and I had no idea what I was doing. All I knew was that I wanted to choreograph.”

“We kinda stayed in touch since then and in the height of COVID, when I had just come off the cruise ships, we put something together again in the small window which we had to host 30-50 people in a venue. Obviously I had grown a lot since college and so had Kim, and our love from the craft had just kept growing.”

“We sat down one day and spoke about doing it a bit more seriously and doing a couple more productions. First we needed a name though. I had done an interpretive dance, which Kim interpreted as “The Outlore”, and that's how our name grew I guess.”

Kim: “Because it was COVID, theatres and entertainment spaces were under quite a rigorous lockdown. If it was a 100 seater we were only allowed to have 30 people, social distancing, we had to figure out how to get people in the door - when we started those were our biggest obstacles. How do we put on work when the inside of a theater is just not an option?”

“Navigating that space was our playground from when we started and as a result we became quite open to the idea of unconventional performance spaces, and jumping through hoops. Which is why how we view this space that we currently curate is not traditional theatre, which is our background - it's a performance space, an art hub.”

Liam: “Shortly after that when Cape Town opened up again, it was tricky to find a venue that was cost effective to run. Site specific stuff was great, but they wanted us to book out the whole venue because you're taking business away from the restaurant or venue.”

“When we went back into conventional theatre we decided to do theatre-in-the-round and we put this show on called “May I Have This Dance” at The Galloway Theatre, we took it to the National Arts Festival and we did Theatre Arts - that was all a great launchpad back into the world of conventional theatre, but again we found ourselves trying to transform into ‘not a theatre’.”

Kim: “What we found quite a big limitation for us and our company was the fact that a play can be done in a tiny room with two actors, but as soon as you add a physical thing like dance you need space. You need to travel your performers.”

“In theatre spaces, or rather theatre spaces we could afford, you’re limited like 3x2m, which is not great for choreography. We had to keep looking for spaces that could accommodate our pieces, which are very choreography-heavy to be supported in the space. That's how the search for our own platform began.”

Liam: “Just to financially grow, to run a production for three months only becomes profitable after X amount of time. To have a big enough audience to pay enough for everyone involved is another challenge, because most of the theatre spaces in Cape Town are 40 - 60 seaters. After you’ve paid a cast there isn't much left over to pay the producer or the creative team, so finding a large enough space to do one weekend and pack out 150 people was another factor. We want everyone involved to be fairly compensated.”

“So it was space, it was size, it was for our own creations and just to transform the preconceived idea of theatre into a world that we loved, all of that drove us to look for our own space.”

Liam painting what is now the stage at The Outlore Base

How did you guys end up finding this space?

Kim: “This was actually an open hot desk situation, just rows and rows of desks. Also I wasn’t sure how serious we were about taking that step. Liam just used to send me Property24 ads-”

Liam: “I was serious guys (laughs)-”

Kim: “- and I was just saying “oh that’s nice, that’s pretty, lovely walls there”. We started viewing and I still wasn't convinced, then we saw this place and when we walked out Liam just said “Okay let's do this”. I was so taken aback. We went for coffee and Liam told me “Kim, I’m doing it, and I’d like for you to join me, but if you aren’t I’m doing it anyway”. That’s when I realised we were actually going for it.”

Liam: “It all happened in like a month, contracts were signed and everything, and we literally had a week in the space before we opened our first show. All we walked in with was these pallets which make up the stage. It was a Halloween show, Curse of Camp Hellfire.”

“We had put picnic blankets in the middle, we hung branches from the roof and made it all spooky, everyone was scouts and there was a scoutmaster that led the show. Our bar was a trestle table with Sterri Stumpies, we had no Yoco machine. It was literally learning day by day what it takes to run a venue. It was such a wild experience, we had no business practice or event management skills.”

Kim: “But it's kinda cool as well. That's because you don't know what the rules are, you also don't know which rules you're breaking. Theatre owners will look at us like ‘Oh wow, we didn't realise we could do that’ and meanwhile we didn't know that we couldn't.”

Liam: “My initial idea was for us to use the venue 90% of the time and the other 10% would be for other shows. Because our shows would be brilliant obviously, everyone would just come, it's gonna be the hottest thing (laughs). It very quickly wasnt that. Ticket sales were very hard, but the interest in the venue skyrocketed.”

Kim: “I think because of the first show we did, with the platform right in the middle and the audience ‘in the round’, it was a blank canvas. We didn't realise how many unconventional artists, especially performance artists, are out there. Liam did dance, and a lot of the time it was corporate, all big money and flashy you know, or on my side it was theatre, red curtains and all. But there are so many fringe performance artists out there. Stand up comedians, the drag community, they just perform where they can. The drag king community was something I didn't even know existed, and they face the same challenges.”

“All these people were craving a space. I wanna say the community effect has been so inspiring and enlightening, and this space has almost become a place where the unconventional can come and thrive and experiment and do what they wanna do without limitations.”

“Theatres are so boring, and they’re also very brand conscious, always asking ‘what exactly are you doing, we need to know exactly what the performance is’. It almost defeats the point of art.”

“It’s interesting how along our journey the things that we were struggling with and all the obstacles that we faced, we didn't necessarily know how many other people face the same obstacles. Even the fact that we don't do musical theatre, but we do dance and drama, and that's so hard for people to comprehend, even in our own circles.”

“It's nice, for ourselves, to realise that there are other people out there who are creating work which is being treated like ‘the unconventional child in the class’. It’s nice to know that there are other weird kids that are all sharing space.”

Liam: “At the same time there are so many straight plays also coming through this space. It really just opens up so many doors for artists to come through and do different things.”

No definitely, when we found out about Baked Shakespeare, and even Smokeshow - it's so cool that you provide the space for this wide variety of performers to come and do their thing.

Liam: “Yeah absolutely, it's very cool. The interest in the space flipped so much that we found it hard to find space on the calendar because bookings are coming in so quickly. It started as a 3 month window that we had to do a show and now it is more like a 6 month window where we can maybe find a gap. On top of that, doing a show and managing the space became a very big juggling act trying to produce work and keep the space going with the high demand. It was amazing but lots of work went into it. We haven't stopped for 3 years now.”

“Just to see it grow like this, and to see the communities grow. We’ve watched small shows that started off with like 15 audience members grow to audiences of 40 people, just because they have a consistent space to come to monthly. The performers as well get a lot bolder, a lot more confident and prouder of the work that they do, all because they have a space to call home.”

Kim: “It feels like a very organic collaboration, where the venue can grow its brand, and they can grow their brand in the venue. And everyone is very independent, we don’t actually want to be involved. Unless of course something’s going wrong or there's a fire (laughs). But in terms of what the performers do, we trust them to use the space and experiment and see what happens, because that’s how we learn.”

Liam: “We also transform the space a lot as well. For all the different shows we host there are different themes and layouts. It always keeps the audience inquisitive and wanting more, wanting to come back and see what we’re doing.”

I can imagine it's very different from working in a theatre with a set stage, this open space has a lot more potential - a blank canvas for the performers to work with. From seeing the venue at different shows, it's amazing how different the space can look with a few slight changes. Completely different atmospheres.

Liam: “Yeah absolutely, it has the biggest effect on someone’s production.”

Kim: “It's interesting because we have a few people from, let's say the ‘old world’, who comment on the audience. You go to Theatre on the Bay and the audience is a lot older. But also tickets are expensive. The cheapest tickets at the old Fugard are R380! I don't know anyone under the age of 30 who would throw that money away. So the fact that the space can tier the tickets financially, the audience that this space is bringing in is a lot younger, which is an anomaly in theatre.”

“People are seeing the value in the audience and it's interesting to see how they have to adapt. They ask “Where is the backstage room, where do we warm up?” and we tell them, you don’t. The Baked Shakespeare cast is smoking outside on the balcony before the show, or they’re in the fire escape doing their mantras and everyone can hear them. With Smokeshow there’s no separation between the performers and the audience, and I also love that.”

“It feels like we’re going back to where storytelling began, where the audience and the storyteller are pretty much the same person. It’s happened by default, because in this space there is no hiding. There is no quietly sitting backstage. There is no “oh the audience can only come in when I’m ready to perform”

“It all becomes a little bit more immersive for the audience and the setup for the script writer is already done, because the audience has already met the performer or the character and when they get on stage you’re with them immediately.”

A shoot from FREE FALL, a recent production hosted at The Outlore - Image by @_c.grace_creations_

So after 3 years, what can we expect from The Outlore looking forward?

Liam: “I think we’re slowly getting a handle on handling a venue, which is great. We really want to focus on upgrading our own work towards the end of the year. Once the venue is up and running and being maintained on a certain level, we have so many ideas which have been put on the backburner until we feel like we can give it our all. Being able to turn this venue into a bit more of an immersive venue by The Outlore is something that we’re really excited about.”

Kim: “I think sometimes in our heads we remove ourselves from the line up, but we are a part of it as well. Sometimes we remove ourselves from it in our minds, but we’re a part of the fringe community. For us to be able to join the lineup of other artists is where we’re going.”

“We also want to focus on more community events, more like networking events is something we’re striving for as well. If we could be open at 2pm in the afternoon for artists to come hang out regularly that would be great. Kind of a creative networking hub.”

Liam: “Yeah, a little bit more creating, a little bit more networking, definitely growing the community a lot more. We don't plan on going anywhere, I think we’ve kind of cemented ourselves here.”

From your personal perspectives, what is your opinion of the current cultural landscape of the city, and where do you see it going from here?

Kim: “At the moment there seems to be a lot of isolation, between and in communities as well. I understand why, it almost feels like an every man for himself situation with creators because we’re exposed to so little that we think the opportunities out there have to be fought for.”

“At the same time there is a shift starting, particularly in younger artists, where there’s a lot more consideration and care. We’re realising that ‘If I do well you do well’, and we’re seeing ourselves as part of a system. It feels like there’s a collaborative energy growing.”

“Venues are also becoming more multi-disciplinary, like how Ground Culture is doing music, and comedy, and this and that. It’s exciting, and I’m excited about that.”

Liam: “I want to add, when you see these big brands, like Art Club collaborating with Spotify to put on Spotify MOM, that’s definitely the goal for us. But we should also be doing it in our own circles, no matter how big or small you are.”

“We have so much to give and we would love to collaborate every day with other people. Sometimes they’re big, sometimes they’re not, but we always learn from it. Seeing more of that in our professional network circles would be really cool.”

“Also seeing artists being a bit more brave with pitching up and pushing their own work. They’re all got such great ideas and we have a few performers that are scared because it's not sold out. But we’ve all played to rooms of two or three, that’s part of being an independent artist.”

“At the end of the day even if no one has bought a ticket we’re still going to open our doors and give you lights and provide a platform for you. Be brave little artists and come and do what you love because you love doing it. We still sell shows that only sell 10 tickets, and the performers have the best nights because they are able to connect with everyone of those audience members, and those audience members will have the best night after that.”

Follow The Outlore Base on Instagram to see what’s coming up - trust me, there’s always something on.

From theatre, to comedy, dance to improv, The Outlore Base is a platform for all kinds of creatives to showcase their work. I know I’ve walked past Hout St a few times and wondered where the sounds were coming from. Now I know the world of wonder that hides behind the nondescript black gate at number 80.

Stop by sometime, you’re guaranteed a show.

The Lore of THe Outlore Base

Conor Hugo- Sound Producer, Scene Builder

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