A Storm in a Tea Cup

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Death by Chocolate

The office is full of words. Not the awkwardly squeezed arts meets social care kind of text of funding bids and evaluation reports, these are words that take you by surprise scattered on the dining table with the tulips and biscuit crumbs: ‘salt fishcakes’, ‘distressed daughter’, ‘embarrassment’.

It’s the debris of yesterday afternoon’s workshop with spoken word artist Simon Mole and Entelechy’s older emerging artists. Simon has been resident in the Albany for the last month preparing for site specific performance: Indiana Jones and the Extra Chair. For two afternoons Simon has been working with members of the elders company. They have been working together prizing open remembered experiences with language.

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Weaving

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The eight-year old participant says it all: “To me nothing could have been better: the noise and the bubbles because they look magic; everybody working together to create a new world.”

We were in the main dance space at the top of the Siobhan Davies Dance Studios in south London. The event was conjured into life by Entelechy’s Creative Producer Rebecca Swift and inspired and co-facilitated by Siobhan Davies Dance current resident artist, sculptor- weaver, Shane Waltener. For the last few weeks Shane has been working with dancers and the public to explore the performative dimensions of his craft.

So on this brilliantly sunny late winter afternoon we inhabited a space, full of wool and twine and long skeins of shredded paper. As Rebecca said: ‘the materials created a theatrical space for our imaginations…everyone recognized a pile of tangled string, and immediately knew what to do’.

The event is part of Entelechy’s Create and Connect volunteering programme supported by the Mayor of London’s Team London programme.

 

Off Balance?

‘What kept you awake was a feeling that everything in the world has its own size, that if you found its size among the swellings and diminishings it would be calm and shine’

from Tall Windows by Robert Hass

I sneak into the theatre transformed into a playground of hanging silks, wires and ropes and aerial hoops. Some older members of the Entelechy company are spending time with contemporary circus company ‘Upswing’ dipping in and out of the devising process for their new show Old (working title).

Director Vicki Amedume is working with a company of older aerialists. ‘When your profession requires super human strength and skills that do not last with age’, she asks, ‘what happens to you when you get old? How does it affect self worth when you loose your place in the world?’

Witnessing seventy and eighty-year old members of our company, take risk and playfully surrender their weight to the swinging hoop is to glimpse the paradox of age. The poet Czeslaw Milsoz writes of a journey visiting the places of his early youth: ‘I was incomprehensively the same, incomprehensively different’. Here in the theatre you grasp this same sense.

Vidigal: Shakespeare, Sex and Sonnets.

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We’re in a rehearsal space in Nós do Morro , high on the slope of the Vidigal favela with Ipanema beach and one of the greatest views of Rio stretched out beneath us. Outside a blazing afternoon sun; inside six older women weaving in and out of each other, chanting from photocopied scraps of text:

The expense of spirit in a waste of shame

Is lust in action; and till in action, lust…

They move around the room changing direction at each point of punctuation:

…Is perjur’d, murderous, bloody, full of blame,

Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;

They are tracked by the hawk-eyed gaze of their teacher, Royal Shakespeare Company’s Voice Director Cicely Berry. “In the beginning it was absurd. After, in my head there was a kind of Tempest”, said Lillian, one of the Brazilian actresses reflecting on the experience. “While she (Cicely Berry) was explaining I began to get the idea and I liked it. I liked it because of the feelings of love, of hate and anger and affection and everything that I feel. It plays with our heart and we fell in love with him, with Shakespeare.”

In such a short space of time Cicely enables the older performers to physically experience the emotional landscape of the language of the sonnets; the energy and drive of the thought. The experience transcends time. Here in this space Shakespeare is literally seducing these Brazilian women:

Being your slave, what should I do but tend

Upon the hours and times of your desire?

Carmen, another older member of the company, said that as a lover and a wife the language brought back the full emotions of sex, of being together with her husband before he died. “In the class it was”, she said, “like my spirit had left my body and was walking down a long corridor with doors on either side, opening all of the doors. And behind each door was a new word of Shakespeare.”

It’s an auspicious start to the opening weeks of our shared Tempest project with Casa das Fases. This phase made possible with the support of People’s Palace Projects and the British Council. The workshops were part of a much wider programme Forum Shakespeare bringing together teachers and directors from the Royal Shakespeare Company to celebrate the twenty fifth anniversary of Nós do Morro. The event culminated with a public master class led by Cicely Berry and RSC director Justin Audibert held in the auditorium of the Brazilian Academy of Letters.  Casa das Fases and Entelechy showed a short film about the initial stages of our work in the Tempest Project and two of the Brazilian elders spoke passionately of their first encounter with the sonnets.

Entelechy and Casa das Fases in Rio de Janeiro

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Transatlantic boyfriend goes live!

One of the seeds planted by my Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship comes to fruition.  Our most recent 21^st Century Tea Dance at Entelechy in The Albany Theatre, Deptford southeast London, just went global with a live link-up with older performers from EngAGE from Burbank in California. Together over the last few months we have been meeting up over Skype, jointly devising a soap opera on the perils of internet dating. Bit nail-biting but the technology worked. Now we are left with the cliff hanger-is Rosie going to sell her house in Camberwell and move over to Los Angeles? Is John just after her money? Amazing performances from our American partners delivered with wit and panache at 7.45 in the morning!