Horse and Bamboo Theatre

Horse and Bamboo Theatre or Horse + Bamboo Theatre is a British theatre company founded in 1978 by Bob Frith. The company works using masks and visual, puppet, physical, music-based forms rather than text. It works internationally as well as from The Boo in Waterfoot, Rossendale, Lancashire, UK. Since 2012 the emphasis of its work has been increasingly in serving its local community.

Frith taught in the early 1970s at Manchester School of Art (later Manchester Metropolitan University). Unhappy with the prevailing abstraction of the period he experimented with extending purely visual forms to include live performance and music, influenced by Allan Kaprow, Red Grooms and Claes Oldenburg, and working with groups of his students. At the Bede Gallery, Jarrow, he worked on a large scale project with his friend Dave Pearson, filmmakers and artists, and including the musician Alan Price, as well as engineers from the local shipbuilding industry.

In the mid 70s he met Welfare State and worked with that company for two years. He formed Horse + Bamboo Theatre in 1978, with a group of ex-students, musicians and members of Matrogoth Theatre from Leiden, Netherlands.

After 2000 Frith worked closely with Alison Duddle, originally of In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre from Minneapolis on the majority of the company's productions. In late 2016 Duddle left the company.

The name derives from the use of horses to pull a caravan of vehicles when touring, which was a central feature of the company's work from 1979 to 1999. This grew from their commitment to taking their work to rural communities, and using the horses and horse-drawn wagons to attract an audience. Bamboo, due to its lightness and strength, was the main structural timber used in the early horse-drawn touring sets, and was also used to make puppets and music instruments.

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