REHEARSALS

Susannah’s rehearsal

Before the residency commenced, the student actors had been tasked with interviewing an elder person that they knew, or was in their family, taking a long testimony from the encounter modelled around the original questions that Ruwanthie de Chickera had authored in the first incarnation of the Dear Children, Sincerely (DCS) project in Sri Lanka. Annecy Lax, having worked professionally with testimony performance for the past ten years, composed a script from the conversations, which was further developed through rehearsals with the student practitioners who had taken the interviews. Extracts of this script were used as ‘linking’ (link here to tech rehearsal) sections between all of the performances from the different Ariadne directors. Susannah worked with the student actors, Finn Todd, Megan Symons, Morgan Lewins and Adam Pardy to capture the energy, pacing, intonation and emphasis of the original speakers by listening to the recordings of the interviews, trying to capture “something of their spirit” in performance.

From the rehearsal footage, you will see here that Susannah devolves decision-making and creative choices to the actors, whilst always maintaining the central premise of ‘re-play’ and sculpting a cohesive and legible theatrical event.  Her generosity and lively sense of humour meant that the young actors were kept focused and committed through long rehearsals where Susannah was also having to make rapid artistic decisions in order to weave her pieces around the other emerging shows.

Hope's Rehearsal

Hope worked closely with the student practitioners to devise material for her section of the Dear Children, Sincerely performance. Loosely based on a piece called Zahabu that Hope’s theatre company, Mashirika, premiered at the Ubumuntu Arts Festival in 2017, the rehearsals here picked up on similar themes of child abuse and the legacy of trauma, but invited the actors in the piece to examine the issue from their perspective and experience. Working with Grace Durbin, Ilaria Smiderle and Megan Sharman, Hope orchestrated the devising process to not only incorporate their viewpoint on abuse and transmission of trauma, but also to utilise their skills in physical theatre, dance, composition, music and spoken word poetry. The relationship forged in these rehearsals was a special one, with the young actors feeling empowered and respected, finding the experience transformative to their own process, but also to their understanding and appreciation of ‘intercultural’ theatre. Indeed, Grace Durbin took her own piece 13 Reasons Why Not, made for her research Masters at Essex, to the Ubumuntu Festival in 2018.

Dijana’s rehearsal

In the making of their piece for the Dear Children, Sincerely performance, Dijana and Ivana utilised some of the techniques in the repertoire of Dah Teater, and shared by many practitioners from a European tradition of the avant-garde. All rehearsals were opened with physical exercises that promoted concentration on the body and encouraged the young actors, Chloe Atkinson, Eleanor Kingsford and Ruby Mcilroy, to be somatically present in their performances.  In keeping with the overarching theme of the performance, Dijana asked all of the actors to write a letter to the next generation, a letter which would then be cut down, cut up, moved around and mixed together to create a fractured piece of rhythmical poetry. The reassembled text was then set around a number of physical sequences that had developed from games and prompts: ‘come into the room and grab our attention’, or ‘dance to be happy’. The student performers reflected that they were never quite sure of the end result of the process, what it was that they were making, but that under Dijana’s steady and nurturing leadership, they never doubted that they weren’t heading in an important and meaningful direction.

Ruwanthie’s rehearsal

As the originator of the Dear Children, Sincerely (DCS) project, Ruwanthie had indicated that for her contribution to the residency performance, she wished to work on a piece that offered something different to the previous incarnation of the replay of elders’ testimonies. During the week residency, Ruwanthie completed a new play, Girls at Checkpoints, which was scripted with input from the actors in the piece, Piumi Wijesundara, Ewout D’Hoore and Ashling O’Shea, a recent University of Essex drama graduate, and of Sri Lankan descent. In this new work, the idea of legacy is seen through the prism of young women, where three stories of abuse are intertwined to show the patterns and structural permissions of sexual violence in Sri Lanka.

Here we see Ruwanthie extending her previous work on DCS, using biographical stories to reveal the political and social landscape, but making work here for a duo of young female performers. Ashling reported finding the process ‘inspirational’, and certainly Ruwanthie is an exacting and discriminating director, but also one that offered great motivation, precise guidance and creative encouragement to the team working on the piece.

Iman’s rehearsal

Iman and Yasmin arrived with a script for the Dear Children, Sincerely performance comprised of three intertwined testimonies of elders which had been taken in Palestine for concomitant projects produced by Ashtar Theatre. Working with a University of Essex student performer, Jack Parker, the rehearsal process was one of intense discussion and time to absorb the nuance of the events in the script. Because of the geo-political complexity of the incidents detailed in the testimonies, from the Mandate for Palestine, to the United Nations Partition Plan, and then to the Arab-Israeli war, the Nakba and beyond, there was much historical, political and cultural context to impart and comprehend in the script.

We see that the rehearsal process here is analogous to a number of testimony performances, where there is a process of reading, discussion, unpicking and unpacking the lines before working out the relationships and interactions between the speakers on stage, and the ‘rules’ of engagement with the audience. Jack was deeply inspired by his work with Iman, and was in thrall to her articulacy and drive, and in turn, Iman supported Jack’s professional development by inviting him to take part in a theatre festival at Ashtar in Palestine.