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RADA, 2023

Photos by Linda Carter.

I had the pleasure to work at RADA again on the MA Theatre Lab course run by the visionary Ian Morgan.

The course is for theatre makers and I ran a devised module where we made and rehearsed a work for performance in five weeks.  The student group were tremendous and already artists in their own right, taking time out from industry to embark on twelve months of study with other artists. We used the structure of a work called The Arrival as our source material. The Arrival is a small twelve-page theatre text co-authored by myself and Sita Brahmachari which was performed in collaboration with The National Centre for Circus Arts in 2013. 

Our work was called HOME and told the story of forced migration, an insight into the human story of the results of wars, persecution, climate change and other crises that speak to the heart. An evocation of the treacherous escapes, crossings and landings of the kinds made every day by migrants into the United Kingdom, HOME told the stories of both the domestic and broader reasons why people would uproot their lives and reinvent themselves in an alien land, language and culture. Whether here as refugees or as economic migrants, the necessity and bravery of their journeys, central to the story and in contrast to the politically driven negative discourse. 

We created a completely new text and shaped new physical sequences, all drawn from research, contemporary commentaries, and verbatim text. The musical score was created by Felix Cross.