About us
Theatre is not “live” just because there are actors breathing in front of you. That is enough for some companies but not for us. Our actors are ALIVE, not just ‘live’.
Living theatre
We live truthfully, moment to moment within the play; present and responsive. The words stay the same but our actors play off each other and the audience so that every performance is unique and vibrant.
Heritage theatre is like rows of dead butterflies in a museum display case. We are not like that. We are alive, here and now. You can’t pin us down.
The Butterfly promise
- The Butterfly effect. Chaos theory predicts that small changes create surprisingly big results. When we flap our wings we can create hurricanes.
- Butterfly has evolved. We have developed a new way to work. Through a rigorous rehearsal process, our actors are trained not to decide what they’re going to feel beforehand, but to respond in impulsive ways, just like in real life.
- Butterfly is unpredictable. We never try to recreate what has happened in the previous performance. How is this even possible? Every cell in our body has changed, the Earth has rotated. Theatre is not a DVD that you watch again and again. It’s alive.
- Butterfly is beautiful – “The fact of our imperfect understanding should not be allowed to feed our anxiety and so increase the need to control. Rather our studies could be inspired by a more ancient, but today less honoured, motive: a curiosity about the world of which we are part. The rewards of such work are not power but beauty.” – Gregory Bateson
Artistic director
Aileen Gonsalves has been theatre practitioner for over 15 years. She trained as an actor at The Central School of Speech and Drama and continues to work across all areas of theatre, film, radio and television.
She began her directing career at the RSC assisting Greg Doran and Tim Supple on All’s Well That Ends Well and Midnight’s Children. She co-founded C Company and directed 25 productions for them at The Bridewell Theatre and other venues. She is the RSC Youth Ensemble director and directed A Winter’s Tale and A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Courtyard Theatre in Stratford upon Avon.
Aileen wrote Grandmothers, an afternoon play for BBC Radio 4, and an episode of Tracey Beaker for CBBC as well as various stage plays. She is winner of various awards including Granada New Writing Competition, London New Play Festival and Stratford East New Playwriting competition.
She teaches and directs at various drama schools, most regularly as the second year acting tutor at Arts Ed where she continues to develop her unique directing process.