Residency artists and researchers Performing arts, performance art Philippa Hambly & Samantha Jayne Williams Performer and MA Advanced Theatre Practice Acheulian Theatre is a collaboration between physical theatre artist Philippa Hambly and art writer and theatre maker Samantha Jayne Williams. The Acheulian hand axe is the earliest known human tool. Acheulian Theatre is a tool for cutting into reality and digging out its hidden parts. Through playful experiments, we make work that responds to current experience. At the Saari Residence we will be researching and developing a performance in which three women stage stories from the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic, distilled from the oral legends of ancient bards. Two are convicted murderers from the twenty-first century, Amanda Knox and Delara Derabi. The other is medieval mystic, Birgitta of Sweden who claimed to channel the voice of God. The project is an alchemical attempt to boil down cultural and historical crosscurrents of magic and myth, gender and violence to disclose the contemporary feminine element. We will be working with the theatrical tool of mask as a means of stripping away personality, and the cultural specificity inscribed within it. Conventionally, masks are male. Female characters appear unmasked. By using mask, and having characters perform other characters, we concentrate what is irreducible about female power, its iterations and representations, and how it often appears in outsider figures. Integral to our residency will be the development of a praxis for bleeding performance, reality and fiction, working through the creative languages of writing, theatre and visual art, and beyond them into emergent forms. Philippa Hambly & Samantha Jayne Williams worked at the Saari Residence in January and February 2015.