As Kamchàtka’s Fugit comes to IF: Milton Keynes International Festival 2025, Dorothy Max Prior speaks to founder member and co-director Gary Shochat about the company’s extraordinary body of site-specific and outdoor theatre work, and the creation of this and other shows
I’m on a beach in Great Yarmouth, on the first day of Out There Festival, awaiting the start of Kamchàtka. There’s a murmur moving through the crowd, and heads turn towards the sea. We see a horizontal line of people, dressed in drab clothes of an indeterminate time or fashion, each clutching a small suitcase. A hush falls. It is hard not to immediately think of the very many heartbreaking stories of people arriving on beaches, seeking asylum. Especially here, in a town that has recently voted in a Reform MP vowing to ‘stop the boats’.
The group of eight – six men and two women – move slowly and silently towards us, communicating just with glances and small gestures. A rope is pulled across the sand, and we are ushered wordlessly across or under the rope, away from the promenade. The eight-strong ensemble are insistent and determined – although never a word is spoken. They seem to communicate with each other by telepathy! People trying to sit out on a bench are offered a hand up and escorted across the ‘border’. There are stand-offs with groups of teenagers, some of whom eventually succumb; some of whom run away. Two company members lift a pram (with a baby still in it) over the rope, the parents trusting all will be OK. And it is – the utmost care is taken. Eventually, absolutely everybody in sight has crossed the rope border.

The action then moves to the street. Suitcases are piled up on the pavement; audience members have their bags taken and added to the pile, before being invited in to join the action, climbing on street furniture or lying on the ground.
Bags returned to their owners, the group of eight move on to the road, stepping in front of cars to try to stop them, climbing onto a bus, and when the Dotto tourist train approaches, trying to hitch a lift. Cars and buses hoot, drivers shout out. The Dotto train driver joins in the joke at first, then tires of the game and tries to move on, but the company aren’t having it, sitting on the front, and clambering on the roof, joining passengers in the open carriage. It’s an amusing moment, but I’m also thinking of the terrible tales of Central American migrants who risk life and limb (literally, many lose lives and many lose limbs) riding the notorious La Bestia train through Mexico in the hope of reaching the USA.
Kamchàtka, made by the Catalan company of the same name,is an extraordinary piece of work which I’ve seen three times in three different locations – and each time it is completely different, but always sparking an uneasy mix of laughter-inducing tableau and poignant commentary on our attitudes to the eternal and ongoing story of human migration.

Speaking to company member Gary Shochat – first in person at the Circostrada FRESH Streets conference in Great Yarmouth, and later via email – I learn how the Kamchàtka collective came into being, and what has led to them staying together for two decades, creating such an extraordinary and exciting body of site-specific and street theatre work, with an appearance coming up soon at IF: Milton Keynes International Festival (July 2025) for the UK premiere of Fugit.
Most of the members of the company met for the first time in Barcelona in 2006, at a street theatre workshop led by Adrian Schvarzstein. The workshop ended with a final improvisation session on the street, wearing suits and carrying suitcases. Following this experience, some of the people who had participated in the workshop started meeting on a weekly basis to train and to continue improvising in public space together. (And we can note that nowadays the company run their own Migrar street theatre workshops.)
‘We were people with quite different backgrounds,’ says Gary. ‘Some of us were immigrants who had recently arrived in Barcelona; some of us had day jobs; some had considerable experience as performers, story-tellers, clowns or puppeteers. But what made us stick together and continue meeting regularly was our common interest in performing in public space, our need to delve into the subject of immigration and its significance on a personal and social level and, most importantly, a sense that we were discovering a new form of collaborative theatrical work where the power of the piece and the fluidity of improvisation really depended on teamwork and generosity, without the use of words.’
Through these training and improvisation sessions, they started developing a unique theatrical language which was inherently collaborative and which ‘depended not only on our curiosity but also on our ability to be generous, ego-less, and patient when faced with real-life situations’. Less a specific theatrical technique than a process of developing the awareness, discipline and trust required to improvise as a group. As some of the members of the training group were already seasoned performers, friends and colleagues often came to see them as they improvised on the streets of Barcelona and unexpectedly they were invited by an acquaintance to perform in a festival he was organising in a village not too far from Barcelona.
‘Suddenly, we had to create a show,’ says Gary. ‘We had to decide on a name, the length of the show, how many people would perform each time. We were over 15 people in the group at the time so deciding that the show included only 8 performers was not an easy task.’

Nearly 20 years have gone by since they met and started working together, but the group still functions as a collective and their shows are led by the same principles which had fascinated them and brought them together all these years ago.
That first Kamchàtka show continues to be booked by Outdoor Arts festivals worldwide. It remains, as Gary puts it ‘highly relevant in terms of its subject matter: examining our collective ways of seeing and reacting to the other is always relevant and fascinating, but furthermore, the decisive importance human migration has had in forging our culture has become more and more evident in this media-frenzied world so a lot of people can still easily identify with our timeless and generic immigrant image.
‘The fact that we do not speak also helps underline a message which I think is deeper and more universal as years go by and keeps fascinating the public. Most importantly, I think the main reason for the long life of the show is due to its improvisational essence which requires us to be very alert and reactive even after all these years: even after being performed more the 650 times the show maintains a sense of freshness which is hard to find in other shows which have such a long trajectory.’
The sense of risk taken as they hit the street, without really knowing what will happen next, is what gives Kamchàtka such an edge: ‘We make a point not to discuss the space we are performing in pre-show and usually don’t even see the space in advance so we really have to react to real stimulation and situations in real time, and put all the weight of our presence on the here and now. Unlike many other improv forms, we are not improvising just in order to entertain our audience, but rather in order to make sense of the world (a sense which is at times endearing and at times absurd), and in order to act and react to the real world which surrounds both us and the audience. This makes every show different and timely.’

At a panel discussion in Great Yarmouth Gary talked about creating work in a site-responsive way, encountering the ‘past, present and future’ of a place. In our email exchange afterwards, I ask him to elaborate.
‘This sense of placemaking comes first and foremost by the nature of how we use public and private spaces in our different shows: we truly observe the space we are in and adapt to it according to its nature, regardless of whether the show is an improvised show, where we have to observe the space, or a site-specific show, which has set scenes which we customise to the different spaces we are offered or find when location scouting. We always consider the space, observe it, explore it, react to its nature and interact with what is happening in it in real time.’
Gary speaks of creating ‘visual and emotional souvenirs’ which are shared with the public they are with – whether they be ticket holders or passers-by – and which later affect the way these spaces are viewed and experienced once the show is over.
As an example, ‘If while performing in a place which is usually loud, indifferent and neglected, we are able to create a moving and silent scene, or a movement which explores a place in a surprising way, we are injecting new meaning to this space and creating a place which is more open to the inherent surprises and contradictions public space holds and to the acceptance of the other as part of this shared space’.
This sense of placemaking is even further heightened when the company are able to explore local history and heritage either through prior research (in site-specific shows and special projects) or ‘by coincidence’ when stumbling upon local traditions, shared memories and emblematic places.

Kamchàtka have a strong ongoing relationship with IF: Milton Keynes International Festival, and are back again this July. At the last edition, in 2023, they presented Alter, a night-time show set in the woods. The show was named as one of The Observer’s top ten theatre events of the year. I ask Gary to tell those of us who didn’t witness this a little more about the piece.
‘Alter is a journey into the memories, existence and gaze of the other, of our fellow men and women. The show started off as an idea of exploring the past of these timeless travellers, before they joined as a group, and triggered by our need to express our individual character within this group which is very homogenic and always united in our other shows.
‘We knew we wanted to work in a different space and different context, hence the decision to create a show performed in the dark and in a rural area, outside of the streets we were accustomed to work in.’
The show also provided the opportunity to introduce video and live music, elements that Gary says ‘we were very hesitant to work with at first’.
Regardless of all these novelties, the key to the show’s emotion remains, Gary says, ‘in the same tools which have led our work ever since the company started performing, and those are: eye contact, collaboration, the sense of belonging to a group, and joy’.

Fugit, the show that Kamchàtka is presenting at Milton Keynes for the 2025 edition, is described as ‘an homage to all those with the courage to abandon their home and strive for a better world’. At the FRESH conference, Gary Shochat and fellow company member Luis Petit tell us that the Fugit creation process involved ‘intense work in many neighbourhoods with different communities’. They spoke of the value of ‘creating shared memories’, noting that ‘people are not ‘objects to use in your show’ and speaking of ‘leaving a trace’ in the community after the work has finished.
Later, I ask Gary to tell me more about the IF iteration of Fugit, and his role in the process.
I learn that Fugit was actually created before Alter. It premiered in 2014, and, like other works by Kamchàtka, is a collective creation, with all company members as co-creators.
‘It is a site-specific show,’ says Gary, ‘and every time we put on the show different members of the company assume the role of artistic coordination and direct the show locally; their tasks range from technical coordination, to location scouting, working with local volunteers and organisations, adapting the show’s skeleton to the territory and managing the team. I am lucky to be coordinating the show in at IF Milton Keynes together with Andrea Lorenzetti.
‘The show originated from our need to explore the emotion and physicality of fleeing (fugit in Latin): the moment in which one is forced to flee from a place, and what the ensuing journey might provoke in them and in society. The creation process took three long years of trial and error: exercises, games, experiments, a lot of group discussions and collective decision-making.’
Gary goes on to explain that through this process they ‘explored spaces we have never worked in before, and discovered new theatrical tools and group dynamics’.
Nonetheless, he believes that both for the company and for the public, especially for the people who have previously witnessed other Kamchàtka shows, Fugit’s core features ‘ the same things which run through all our work and which bring emotion and depth to all our other shows. In that sense it has a lot in common with Alter, only in a completely different context, setting and scale of emotion’.
Fugit has been described as ‘horribly apposite at the moment’. How does Gary feel about Kamchàtka’s work on migrancy still being so relevant to the world in 2025?
Kamchàtka’s conviction of the importance of exploring these themes hasn’t faded; only nowadays it is mixed with what Gary describes as the rage and fear over the rise in popularity of fascist and populist politics and xenophobia.
‘Unfortunately we have been surprised time and time again by just how relevant and timely our shows, especially Fugit, have become over the years in face of the different wars and humanitarian crises the world has witnessed in the past two decades, and the waves of human displacement it has created worldwide. Fugit was conceived before the civil war in Syria or the war in Ukraine had started, so in that sense I can say, quite sadly, that in a way our work has become even more relevant by the escalation of tragic events and catastrophes around the world.’
But regardless, Kamchàtka remain determined to continue to present their message that migration is essentially a positive, not negative, occurrence for humankind.
‘Part of what kept us going and energised the group from the very first stages of working together till now was our belief that the story we tell is a universal and timeless story’, he says. ‘Human migration is a phenomenon which is central to the human experience and is recurring and cyclical throughout human history.’

Featured image (top): Kamchàtka: Fugit. Photo Julie Melando
Dorothy Max Prior interviewed Gary Shochat in person at FRESH Streets conference in Great Yarmouth, May 2025, presented by Circostrada in collaboration with Out There Arts,; and later via email. www.circostrada.org
Kamchàtka: Fugit runs from Thursday 24 July to Saturday 26 July at 1pm and 7.30pm, as part of IF: Milton Keynes International Festival.
Starting point: Wolverton, Milton Keynes (exact location sent to bookers in advance). Tickets £15, under-16s £10. Booking: https://ifmiltonkeynes.org/
Concept, joint creation and performers: Cristina Aguirre, Maïka Eggericx, Sergi Estebanell, Claudio Levati, Andrea Lorenzetti, Judit Ortiz, Lluís Petit, Josep Roca, Edu Rodilla, Santi Rovira, Gary Shochat, Prisca Villa.
Additional performers: Amaya Mínguez, Jordi SoléArtistic direction: Kamchàtka / Adrian Schvarzstein
For more on Kamchàtka, see https://kamchatka.cat/
Kamchàtka’s Fugit is part of IF: Milton Keynes International Festival which runs from Friday 18 July to Sunday 27 July 2025.
Other highlights of this year’s IF:
Four years in the making, Transe Express’ DNA, Vertical Odyssey is a show in the sky which began as an engineering project. The action – a vertical choreography of climbing, aerial dance, circus, precision drumming and the singing and playing of an original score – takes place on a 40-metre-high sculpture under a 200-ton crane. (France – UK Premiere): Friday 25 July & Saturday 26 July, 9.45pm
Mark Anderson’s four-hour durational Warning Notes in Fred Roche Gardens is a captivating sound and light installation-cum-performance. Striking instruments give voice to the social and ecological alarm rippling across our planet. Anderson was one of the artists who took part in For the Birds seen at the 2018 IF Festival. (UK)
Thursday 24 July to Saturday 26 July, 6pm – 10pm
Tania El Khoury is a US-based British artist and academic of Lebanese origin. Her interactive sound installation, Memory of Birds, was created in collaboration with a trauma therapist. Lying in a scented pod hidden in the trees of Campbell Park, audiences will hear a soundscape featuring migrating birds, exploring political violence and the impact of war on contested land, the environment and wildlife. (UK / Lebanon)
Friday 25 and Saturday 26 July: on the hour between 11am and 6pm
Sunday 27 July: on the hour between 11am and 4pm
For further information on all shows and to book tickets, see https://ifmiltonkeynes.org/