We are in the process of developing The Rewilding of Uncle Dad, a site-specific walking and audio performance about how we transform amid collapse.
The piece asks how changing the way we experience our environment opens up new ways of seeing and being. We ask what wildness is and how we can ‘rewild’ ourselves in even the most un-wild of places.
Teaser video filmed at early test performance in and around Waschauer Strasse (Berlin) April 2025
Video credit: Vincent Jondeau
WHAT HAPPENS?
The audience are invited into the shifting world of Uncle Dad – an office-working everyman whose world is falling apart. Uncle Dad is part fiction, part biography – an amalgam of our experience of our fathers’ working lives.
The audience wear silent disco headphones and listen to original audio made up of found sounds, bespoke field recordings, fragments of text, and live sounds from the environment they are experiencing. We create a shifting world of live and pre-recorded audio, using specialist microphones which pick up the city’s invisible sounds, like the buzzing and popping of electrical advertising boards and the footsteps of tiny underwater insects.
The performers guide the audience through the cityscape, creating moving tableaux and inviting the audience to deeper sensory contact with their environment and with each other. Audio, physical performance and the unique scenography of the city we play in layer together to challenge ideas of wildness and civilization, asking what it really means to
The piece will be re-shaped to adapt to each place we perform. We will create a bespoke route for each location we play in, adapting the narrative and dramaturgy of the piece to fit the spatial and historical/political context of the environment we are in. We will rework the soundscape incorporating sounds specific to the locality into the soundscape and offering a second audio channel for translated text.
The audience/participants set off walking together 
The audience/participants looking at a reflective surface listening to narrative text 
The audience/participants entering a new space 
Lizzy performing as the “guide” personna 
Left is Michelle performing as the Uncle Dad personna right is an audience member 
Michelle performing as Uncle Dad personna 
Left Uncle Dad personna, Right is Guide personna 
The audience/participants moving together to a new location 
The audience/participants invited to watch the road below, on the headphone plays the sound of a river 
The audience/participants are invited to sit on pebbles, on the headphones the sound of waves on the beach plays, they are invited to remove their shoes and feel the stones beneath their feet 
The audience/participants moving to a new location, they are invited to place their hand over their heart, the sound of a heartbeat plays over the headphones 
The audience/participants moving through a busy space, over the headphones Madonna’s “Holiday” plays, participants are invited to dance together 
On top of the building we see the Uncle Dad personna, his face covered with a ribbon mask, open his brief case and releases 100e notes 
100e notes from brief case 
Invitation to rewild pasted onto 100e note
Images from test performance at ZKU (Berlin) September 2025
Photo credits: Abel Steen
Development
We have developed the piece between Berlin, London, Scotland, France & Yorkshire.
We have tested the performance in the following different locations:
City centre – public transport, malls, corporate buildings (Warschauer Strasse, Berlin 2025, Sheffield City Centre 2025)
Arts complex internal and external structures of Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik (ZKU) (Berlin 2025)
Rural parkland Vogrie Pogrie Festival.(Edinburgh, Scotland, 2025)
Indoors, industrial building of architectural interest – Le Fabrique Autonomme des Actuers, Bataville, France, October 2025
Audience/participants begin walking, they encounter performers 
Performers guiding audience/participants through the city 
Audience/participants invited to place their hand over their heart and walk together, the sound of a heartbeat plays over the headphones 
Audience/participants are guided through a mall, performers engage with the space 
Performer (Michelle) and audience/participant the headphones play an instruction to “bend your knees, crouch down and let it out” 
Audience/participants are guided to a green space in the middle of the city, over the headphones they hear birdsong
Images from test performance in city at Warschauerstrasse (Berlin) April 2025
Photo credits: Abel Steen
Who is the piece for?
-Age 7+
-People who are physically able to move through urban spaces (including stairs
-People who are local to or have an association with the place it is being performed in.
-People who are interested in site-specific work
-People who are interested in the environment
-People who are interested in field recording
FAQ’s
How many audience members can there be?
We have tested the performance with up to 17 people. We have enough headphones to have 35 audience members.
Do we need any staff members from the partner organization to support the piece?
We need at least 1 “route facilitator” to support us during the piece.We can work with a member of the partner organization to carry out this role or bring along an extra member of our team.
This role consists of:
– Meeting the audience participants at the pre determined location and giving out headphones/instructing people how to use headphones
– Answering any practical questions that the audience has.
– Giving information about duration/location of nearest toilet facilities etc.
– Helping to keep audience/participants together during the performance
– Fielding interaction from the public and authorities during the performance
Can the performance take place within the partner organization’s space/building?
We created a test version of the performance which was held in and around the main building of an arts centre (Berlin’s ZKU) during an open market event hosted there. This can work well in the right context and if the space has some of the main the architectural elements (roof, stairwells, main event space, garden space outside) which we use to create the performance. We also adapted the work to take place indoors in the former shoe factory at Bataville, France.
Video from residency at Le Fabrique Autonomme des Acteurs (Bataville, France) October 2025
Video credits: Michelle Madsen & Lizzy Margereson
Tech Specification:
Provided by Bait
-40x headphones
-2x wireless transmitters
– specialist field recording microphones (hydrophone, electro magnetic microphone etc)
– mobile sound mixer
Provided by partner organization
-Dressing room space to store equipment, personal items and costume before and after performance
-Access to 240v power point to charge headphones and transmitters
BAIT 