devising
devising
Devising is still very new to me and below are the only devised pieces, aside from The Trouble With Today's Women, that I have been a part of, i.e. work that incorporates elements of postmodern theatre, and physical theatre, often leaving text outside of the performance.
you call him from the shop about the bread
"There is no period so remote as the recent past."
Utilising this sense of intangibility, we have explored the last 20 years through the lens of pop culture moments and domestic ritual; shared memories which both mark and disrupt our sense of time. The universal domestic banality that pervades much of our daily life also consumes much of our recent memories. These memories exist merged within a compressed liminal space between the past and the present.
Central Bankside, RCSSD, 2018
"You Call Him From The Shop About The Bread" was the first fully devised show I have been a part of. The process taught me a lot about my feelings regarding theatre-making and it was surprising to see the myriad of ways in which we worked together as a company to try and create new work. I discovered that collaborating in a devising context is demanding and arduous, and is completely unlike collaborating in a theatrical context where the roles have been pre-determined. We chose not to work within the traditional theatre hierarchy, as a non-hierarchical structure of work creates situations that allow for a greater depth of self-discovery. For that, I am grateful to this experience, and the material created in this show may inspire some of my future work.
risk lab
Risk Lab, or what began as The Risk-Taking Artist, was the second devising and collaborating project I was a part of with a wonderful theatre artist, Ada Mukhina. Telematic theatre uses the Internet to connect two physically disparate locations together on stage. Ada began playing with the idea of absence and of bringing a performer into the performance space who is not physically present. Several weeks of devising later, she brought artist Abhishek Thapar into the performance space via Skype, to discuss the problematic labels within The British Museum. In one of the photographs above I'm wearing one of the labels intended as a revolutionary act, over my mind, and it says "Stolen From India." These labels can be placed under or over any of the labels in The British Museum that mistakenly indicate that some artefact is a gift, when in fact, it is an existing symbol of colonialism.
The intention of Risk Lab is to bring a different risk-taking artist from anywhere in the world to join Ada in the performance.
I helped Ada with her creative process up until June 2018 and she took the piece forward, with a performance in October 2018 at the Camden People's Theatre in London.
Welcome to RiskLab, a place to explore risk in art and artists at risk, through technology. RCSSD, 2018.
react with poet in da corner
This week at The Royal Court was a devising experience unlike any other because it not only used music to facilitate free-writing, but asked us to write and perform our own bars to beats as part of a collaborative performance. It was refreshing to be outside the drama school training environment and at The Royal Court. It was incredible to be at the back of the theatre listening to grime music. A group of women were encouraged by the original writer of "Poet in Da Corner," a show based off of Dizzee Rascal's album "Boy in Da Corner," to be MCs. We met on Monday and by Friday presented a show to an audience that we had written, devised, and performed ourselves. It was exhausting and incredibly rewarding, and I am still processing the learning behind it. It encouraged me to not shy away from involving music in my theatrical work, which is often the case when you're not specialising in musical theatre.