Weaving

►

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.

►

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

►

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!

Casa das Fases and Entelechy in London

The whole experience is wrapped magically in a scorching Indian summer: late September and the temperatures are in the high twenties. Seven days spent preciously- rich experience juxtaposed with a ‘doing nothing in particular’ rhythm.

Two older actors from the Brazilian company Casa das Fases spend a week with older performers from Entelechy. ‘We learn about ourselves from the gaze of the other’.

We host an ‘engagement party’ for invited friends and supporters and Casa das Fases perform ‘Equal’ their lyrical and haunting production. It’s the story of two conjoined sisters separated by surgery when young and growing older together. One of the sisters begins to loose her memory and slowly they begin to become strangers to each other.

Our Brazilian guests bring letters from Londrina: stories, trinkets and fragrances. On this journey we have all dangerously left behind pre-conceptions of who we are or who we might become. You can almost taste ‘possibility’ hanging: ‘I had never dreamt that I would be doing this at my age’ says one of the Entelechy company. ‘I don’t speak Portuguese but we just found a way of talking’

It’s the launch of The Tempest Project’, a two year weaving of Shakespeare’s play into the lives of older people in London and Londrina.  During their lifetimes older participants from both companies have survived by juggling multiple identities: mother, wife, daughter, lover, friend and stranger; endless realities often hidden and unspoken.

On a Friday afternoon in the Western Pavilion in the Southbank Centre with half of London stretched out beneath us under that glorious sun everyone begins to move, with their multiple ways of experiencing the world, into an engagement with Shakespeare’s text.

The triumphant procession

►

‘Now just imagine the triumphant procession’ says the narrator in Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, only here on this south London street there are no fictional animals (just real people) and it is the beginning of an adventure rather than the end. I was going to write about the theatre of the performance event but it is encapsulated in the theatre of the journey. Motorists double take at the large group of people moving like a shoal down the back streets of New Cross Gate. Distinguished men in suits being pushed along in wheelchairs, a young woman with a bicycle, people of all ages. There are people from just around the corner and people from far away: a dancer from Minneapolis, a writer from Bradford, musicians, poets, producers, a man pushing his mother.

It’s part of Entelechy’s The Deptford Project building long relationships with older people living in residential homes, uncovering and rekindling artistic skills and ambitions and once again journeying out into the world with a story, poem, a song or dance. On this Monday afternoon in September there are so many people sharing the conversation. Manley Court nursing home, Entelechy, The Ageing Well Fun Club, Freedom Studios in Bradford, Kairos Dance in Minneapolis, The Spitz Jazz collective: just a group of people moving with common purpose down the street.

►