ACTIVITY

‘Tales of Spring and Winter’ was structured around the creation of two new original performance-pieces: Dear Children, Sincerely. . . and Cold Season in Calcutta, both of which we developed through an intensive week’s residency with all the participating artists at the University of Essex, June 19-23rd 2017. This was followed by a public Performance and Symposium Day at the Mercury Theatre, Colchester, Saturday June 24th, 2017.

During the residency at the University of Essex, we worked with the members of the global network Ariadne, convened and led by theatre director Susannah Tresilian from the UK: Hope Azeda of Rwanda; Ruwanthie de Chickera from Sri Lanka; Frederique Lecomte from Burundi and D.R. Congo; Iman Aoun in Palestine; Dijana Milosevic in Serbia.  These directors brought with them mentees and collaborators to be part of the project and extend the legacy of the work: Ivana Milenovic Popovic, Ewout D’Hoore, Yasmin Shlalda, Piumi Wijesundara. We also invited students from the University of Essex LINK TO A PAGE WITH STUDENT VIDEOS ON to take part in the residency, alongside some members of the Mercury Theatre’s community groups, who gamely became super-heroes in Frederique Lecomte’s anarchic and visionary offering that concluded the symposium day. 

We asked all the Ariadne members and participants to collaborate as directors or performers on a new incarnation of Dear Children, Sincerely. . . This project was originally conceived by Ruwanthie de Chickera and first premiered in Sri Lanka by her company Stages Theatre Group, where Sri Lankans born in the 1930s were interviewed about the seismic social and political changes they had seen during their lifetimes.

As part of our project in 2017, we asked for new material and new approaches from all the directors and theatre-makers involved, to create pieces which simply took the core idea of conversations between the generations – to make the cluster of performances you can see here, premiered at the Mercury Theatre in June 2017. As a way of understanding better the artistic methods and goals of the theatre-makers in the Ariadne group, Annecy Lax (University of Essex) collaborated with director and Ariadne founder, Susannah Tresilian, in the making of a new testimonial piece from elders during the five-day residency.

In a very different dramaturgical thread of the project, Elizabeth Kuti, in collaboration with theatre director Trilby James and actor Shelley King, wrote a new play, Cold Season in Calcutta, LINK TO COLD SEASON PERF inspired by Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. In a very different approach to our research questions about the role of theatre in articulating national identity and postcolonial conflict, this new play explored Anglo-Indian relations in the 18th century, through a story inspired by founding of the playhouse in Calcutta in 1775, the imperial transportation of Shakespeare into India, and the intertwining of Indian and English histories.  This was given a rehearsed reading at the Performance and Symposium day at the mercury on June 24th 2017.