I use performance as a medium to tell stories and create experiences. I am interested in theatre that happens in non conventional spaces and that uses the body as a vehicle to generate images. Often the themes I have explored as a maker are informed by my work as a facilitator. Therefore, I created work on displacement, belonging, otherness, women rights and discrimination.
This is a selection of projects.
This is a selection of projects.
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No Feedback No Feedback is an immersive theatrical event that combines cutting-edge human rights research and physical theatre. With no seats available, the setting demands that each audience member engages directly with the performers, the instructions they give and the information they share. They are led through a series of tests and games by the performers who are in one moment helpful and friendly, in the next unsettling, as the gentle pull of discrimination that tears at the fabric of everyday life is gradually introduced. Using the 10 Stages of Genocide by Genocide Watch as its underlying framework, No Feedback has been created in partnership with leading human rights charities. |
Lieu de Vie
In 2016, Pan Intercultural Arts was invited by Good Chance Theatre to deliver a week of drama workshops for the residents of the Calais Jungle. When we returned to the UK we struggled to find even basic language to describe this experience to family, friends and colleagues. Over the following months we began a process of creatively disseminating this to a wider field. From workshops with students and the public, to collecting contemplations (art work, objects, soundscapes, spoken word, film) from 18 other volunteers who went to work there into an installation called Make/Shift. |
This piece was my response to the brutal bulldozing of half of the camp. After that event we returned to Calais and I collected objects that I found amongst the debris. It was first presented at the Encampment event at Southbank Centre in August 2016.
Listen here/ watch a video reportage here.
Listen here/ watch a video reportage here.
Land Ahoy
Performance created and performed with Ilana Gorban. Commissioned by the Platforma Festival of Arts by and about Refugees to Goldsmiths College students.
Land Ahoy is a short tale about being stranded on a bureaucracy sea.
How much are the narratives of our lives being questioned?
How one has to adapt his own story in order to fulfill a questionnaire?
It is all about giving the right answer, reality doesn't always make the difference.
However the rules of this system keep changing and …attention, rough sea!
Performance created and performed with Ilana Gorban. Commissioned by the Platforma Festival of Arts by and about Refugees to Goldsmiths College students.
Land Ahoy is a short tale about being stranded on a bureaucracy sea.
How much are the narratives of our lives being questioned?
How one has to adapt his own story in order to fulfill a questionnaire?
It is all about giving the right answer, reality doesn't always make the difference.
However the rules of this system keep changing and …attention, rough sea!
A Place Where
Performance created and performed with dancer Laura Greenhalgh at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich, as part of 2011 Refugee Week's events.
A Place Where explores the theme of exile as a process of emptying and filling spaces, regulated by intangible political power relationships on a large scale and fear of otherness on the scale of individual human encounter. Being far from the real experience of displacement, we therefore asked ourselves what creates a familiar space where human interaction can happen safely and which cultural, national ties and symbols we carry with us as we inhabit new places.
Performance created and performed with dancer Laura Greenhalgh at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich, as part of 2011 Refugee Week's events.
A Place Where explores the theme of exile as a process of emptying and filling spaces, regulated by intangible political power relationships on a large scale and fear of otherness on the scale of individual human encounter. Being far from the real experience of displacement, we therefore asked ourselves what creates a familiar space where human interaction can happen safely and which cultural, national ties and symbols we carry with us as we inhabit new places.
Va bene, conduci tu.
Solo performance inspired by Dorothy Parker's short story "The Waltz". Through the rhythm of an obsessive and repetitive waltz the protagonist struggles to accept her duality while dancing with an unknown partner in a ballroom. She explores exasperation, love and anger as she physically wrestles in a grotesque dance with her imaginary partner. She swings between the anxiety of appearing gorgeous and compliant and the will to hide away, ready to fight predators. Behind its comical nature audience recognised a well know gender based power struggle and a personal journey through self acceptance. This performance was staged at two festivals in Italy in Summer 2010 (Festival Libera I Libri, Siena and Wrong Festival, Firenze) and received a production prize.
Solo performance inspired by Dorothy Parker's short story "The Waltz". Through the rhythm of an obsessive and repetitive waltz the protagonist struggles to accept her duality while dancing with an unknown partner in a ballroom. She explores exasperation, love and anger as she physically wrestles in a grotesque dance with her imaginary partner. She swings between the anxiety of appearing gorgeous and compliant and the will to hide away, ready to fight predators. Behind its comical nature audience recognised a well know gender based power struggle and a personal journey through self acceptance. This performance was staged at two festivals in Italy in Summer 2010 (Festival Libera I Libri, Siena and Wrong Festival, Firenze) and received a production prize.
Gigli e Onde nel Mediterraneo
Play commissioned by The Etruscan Academy Museum of the City of Cortona, Italy, supporting the exhibition “Francesco Laparelli, architetto cortonese a Malta.”
The challenge of this work was to portray the life of Laparelli, the architect behind the fortifications of Malta. We decided to tell the story as a series of imaginary letters that Laparelli would have sent home recounting the events surrounding the Great Siege of Malta of 1565 that opposed the Ottoman Empire to the Holy League.
We used all the elements of costumes and scene to animate these letters and we were accompanied by live original music and singing in Sabir (Mediterranean Lingua Franca).
Play commissioned by The Etruscan Academy Museum of the City of Cortona, Italy, supporting the exhibition “Francesco Laparelli, architetto cortonese a Malta.”
The challenge of this work was to portray the life of Laparelli, the architect behind the fortifications of Malta. We decided to tell the story as a series of imaginary letters that Laparelli would have sent home recounting the events surrounding the Great Siege of Malta of 1565 that opposed the Ottoman Empire to the Holy League.
We used all the elements of costumes and scene to animate these letters and we were accompanied by live original music and singing in Sabir (Mediterranean Lingua Franca).