Growing up in Northern working-class Leeds with its monstrous mills, dirty streets, grey, rain, power-cuts and strikes wasn't the easiest place to find theatre. But I found it - in the people, streets, buildings and somehow - like a magic spell - in me.

My first memories are of the sea, glens, fairies, myth and legend. Maybe the fairies put a spell on me as I dribbled ice-cream in my pram, on the sea-front in Port Erin on the Isle of Man. At four years old, fairies were replaced with brass bands and brick terraces. My dad worked in a metals factory and played in the brass band - it was his life. We lived in a red-brick terrace next to the M1 motorway and an abandoned factory. The factory became a playground, my own world, where I lived fantasies about yellow dogs from space, and mermaids who'd lost their tails. I knew what theatre was: I once sang Puff The Magic Dragon (age 3) on a stage at the beach club - I won a plastic comb. Mum said I could barely speak - I was the second child, a late developer - so I gargled the tune. I'd found my medium of expression - I still suspect the silent sea-nymphs had a hand in this.

I was an angst-ridden, class-conscious, unhappy, skinny, teenager. I wanted to 'do theatre', but people like me didn't do theatre. Theatre was for the posh and educated, not for working-class anorexic Goths. London was the place to be. London, the fairies whispered to me at night. So with a dole cheque, a phone number, and a one-way National Express ticket, off I went. London was home - that's how it felt. Theatre and life was everywhere in London. I found a job in a record shop which paid for a drama school course in the evenings, and eventually I joined the world of jobbing actors.

What I couldn't understand is that I loved theatre - passionately loved it - but I hated everything I saw. It was boring, tired, elitist. Where was the creativity? Why did it matter that my nose was the wrong shape and my teeth too big? My drama teacher at school had talked about physical theatre. I'd learnt about Fo and Brecht, mime, living theatre, Jacques Lecoq. This side of theatre had always, always seemed the most exciting, the most real and the most all-encompassing total theatre. Much more creative than any of the pseudo psycho-babble, the searching for the inner self, and the ten millionth version of Uncle Vania (they were all the same) I kept running into.

I found the people doing devised theatre hiding on the fringe. They had no money, but bags of ideas, energy, creativity. They often seemed to have lived in Paris and trained in Decroux, Lecoq and Grotowski. A Spanish performer I was working with on a physical theatre piece persuaded me to apply to the Lecoq school. 'It's a journey' she said enigmatically. I knew all about this place - it was where the people whose work I loved had been. Surely a now thirty-year-old Northerner couldn't go there?

I got the prospectus, made up the dossier with notes from directors I'd worked with and sent it. I didn't think I would really go - but I was accepted. Lecoq is horribly expensive (too expensive = when an interviewer asked Mnouchkine if Lecoq was a 'master', she replied: 'well, yes he is, but then again a master should not charge so much'). I got a job in the baggage department at Heathrow Airport - the working day started at 4am and finished at 12 noon. Three months of this meant that other than the job and the feeling of going mad, there was no time to have a life. I was in bed by 7pm every day (except Thursdays for yoga). But the money was good - it paid for the first trimester. The rest of the course was paid for by my supportive and long-suffering partner who happened to be French.

I moved to Paris in 2001 and started at Lecoq. Lecoq is not an easy place, and I was confused by it. I didn't speak French, but neither did half the people there. The idea of discovering the 'answers' for yourself was at first baffling (later it was liberating). But it was the most enriching artistic experience I had ever had. I'd never found a 'starting point' for theatre - even after years of working in London with different companies - and finally it was here. I began to discover space, colour, composition, character, animals, the analysis of movement, objects, universes, masks, light, the elements - and with people from all over the world. Language wasn't relevant any more: text and words weren't binding me down.

But it was difficult. The teachers told me I was 'pretending'. I only understood this a few years later when I was working with my company, Head-Langue Theatre and experienced a poetic pronouncement of truth in performance, but without the need for the 'psychological'. Truth, I realised, was in the everyday: the everyday masked the hyper-reality of the dream-world in which we are all consumed. It became our theatrical objective - to discover this truth and share it. I realised that theatre is the perfect medium for the dream-life which we all share, but try to hide like soiled laundry.

I left Lecoq hungry to put all these ideas flying around my head onto the stage - to run headlong into the fire of creative theatre. I found a few willing Lecoq leavers and created the company. We began work with no money on a masked version of Christina Rossetti's The Goblin Market. Finding rehearsal space with no money was grim - we worked in squats. One place had big holes in the roof; snow fell on us while we rehearsed - quite beautiful, but we were frozen. We eventually got some free space in a municipal theatre in a run-down town just outside of Paris. They liked our work and gave us free rehearsal time, a very rare thing indeed. Our first show lost us a lot of money. We played to tiny audiences, and had to pay for the theatre space. This was not the way I wanted to continue.

I carried on with the company, finding different performers to work with, performing in festivals and rehearsing in cramped spaces. To be able to do your own work is an amazing thing, no matter the conditions. Taking performers and audiences into your world and on your creative journey, and to learn so much about the workings of the theatrical experience, is worth more than playing big gold-encrusted purpose-built theatres.

For a few years the company was me with one or two others, depending on the project. In January 2008, I got a group of wonderful performers together to create a piece about the Paris Metro - a place where I spend a lot of time. For all its dirt and stink it's a place where life is lived and dreams are hidden - but only thinly - by the pretence of the quotidian. Head-Langue Theatre today is six people strong, all from very different artistic backgrounds. I direct and perform, and try to encourage the actors to propose as much as possible when devising. I come to a project with definite ideas, whole visuals, piles of scribbles in exercise books. I already know the universe and look of the piece. I usually have a scene-list, loads of visual and physical ideas, a character-list, an outline of whys and what-fors, all to be consolidated in rehearsals. Inside this framework, the performers can go off on tangents - in case we find new, exciting possibilities, and we do - things can be thrown out, new stuff put in at any time. The search is for what works, which is another way of saying 'what is true'. We can spend hours trying to make a good idea work; in the end something different pops up from nowhere, and the original idea is binned. A good idea is no good if theatrically it doesn't work.

Head-Langue Theatre has no funding, and it is still very hard financially and administratively, but artistically it is alive. This year we did a short run at London's Camden Fringe festival and we'll soon be back in London with another short performance; Camden was great. Maybe London will be Head-Langue's future - I'm not sure. New and exciting adventures in theatre ahead (all we need is the money)! But wherever I end up, Head-Langue and some of the performers will be with me. And, faithful as ever, the fairies.

END

(c) Nydia Hetherington 5 September 08

Nydia Hetherington is artistic director of Head-Langue Theatre, Paris. Head-Langue Theatre's Les Anges de l'Enfer (Angels of the Underground) played Camden People's Theatre 17-20 August 08, 19:45 (0:50), as part of Camden Fringe 2008 - review.

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