The Theatre under the Motorway

When Nobody Returns - Iman Aoun and David Broughton-Davies

When we first presented This Flesh is Mine, back in 2014, we used all three spaces in ASHTAR Theatre's lovely Ramallah space, and a fabulous London venue called Testbed 1.   We always knew that Testbed would be a one-off: the bulldozers moved in back in January, and it's doubtless well on the way to becoming a set of desirable dwellings.  So we've been resourceful again - and found a space under the Westway, just along from the bar where Elliot Tupac painted his extraordinary mural during Origins 2015.

The bay under the motorway is large.  You can see the concrete slabs that are the foundation of the road above your head.  Our set, which uses two raked stages facing one another, looks as if the road has fallen in and smashed in the space.  Cladding is ripped and incomplete.  Everywhere there is a sense of wreckage and of provisionality.  The perfect space, in other words, for a pair of productions about war and occupation.  Palestine too is a space with far too much wreckage, and a space where everything is provisional and nothing stable or secure.

The great bonus of a found space like this is that it allows us to play to the epic qualities of Brian Woolland's Plays of Love and War at the same time as being very intimate with the audience.  There are some scenes that take place at height and distance - there are others which happen within touching distance of an audience that is never more than four rows deep.  This is fantastic for the thematic concerns of the plays, which move constantly between the personal and the political, as they explore the impact of war and violence on the lives of fragile individuals caught up in the power of global forces.

When Nobody Returns - Bayan Shbib and Andrew French

As well as being large, the space is also unforgiving in terms of sound.  The Westway itself doesn't make much noise - amazingly - but the area around sometimes does, and the concrete space doesn't resonate at all for voices.  So we have had to develop a sound design solution, and actually this too has become a contributor to meaning.  The actors have been brilliantly miked by Hannu Kuosmanen, and Dave Carey has created an almost continuous soundscape into which their treated voices are injected.  Often you don't even realise there is artificial sound - but there is enough to counteract the motorway and to generate an ambience that supports the voices.  Hannu's mixing of the quadrophonic speakers allows the vocal sound to seem to be coming directly from the actors' mouths, even when they are very close to you.

The space is full of challenges of course - but challenges are often what lead to brilliant creativity and to exciting solutions. The audience and the reviewers have certainly loved this space.  In fact - I find it very hard to imagine how the plays could be done in a conventional theatre....

More info and booking links here!

Origins 2015

Voladores de Papantla

Origins came to an end last Thursday night, with the second performance of Beautiful One Day - the production that critic Matt Trueman said was "the most important show I've seen all year".  We must be doing something right. 

Actually, it's been by far the largest scale and best received festival to date - and we're genuinely delighted with the response.  It's going to take a bit of time to process all that was achieved: in fact, not all of it has been achieved yet, as the education and community work is ongoing, with a whole film project and oral history work coming later in the year.  It's pleasing to look at statistics which tell us more than 500 people came to Horniman's Pleasance on a wet Saturday to see the Voladores fly, and that 1,500 people turned up at the British Museum to see how very much alive the cultures shown in the museum's exhibition turn out to be.  It's great to know that the whole of Cavendish School came off timetable for a week to experience the festival, and that every child spent every day of that week exposed to indigenous cultures at first hand.  It's exciting that there are some clear marks of permanent impact - quite literally so in the case of Elliot Tupac's amazing mural at Acklam Market. 

The real impact, of course, will take longer to emerge. But, at this stage, I just want to say one thing.  We had proposed three key themes for the festival - Elders and Youth, Politics and Protest, Food and Environment.  These were present in spades, of course - but during the festival itself a fourth theme started to emerge very organically from the work being presented, and from the encounters between artists and between artists and audiences that were generated.  And that theme was one of fundamental change.  It probably seems odd to say this in the aftermath of an election that put the right very firmly in power in our country - but the festival served to put this in a much broader context, and left us all, artists and audiences, feeling that corners were being turned, and that our coming together in London was part of a genuine movement towards global justice.  Justice in terms of equality, land rights and self-determination.  Justice in terms of the environment and food sovereignty.  Justice in terms of a revitalized youth and respect for elders.  It felt real.

The festival included the solstice, which marks a time of change.  The Voladores ceremony, which is about the environment and regeneration, was traditionally only performed at the solstice and the equinox - so it felt appropriate.  We coupled it with the Guatemalan play Oxlajuj B'aqtun, which was not only about the solstice, but about an entire change of era in the Mayan calendar, and ended with a profoundly moving sense of spiritual and cultural resurgence for the Mayan people, as they emerge from the near genocide in Guatemala towards an era of renewed strength and vitality. 

This may just be the festival effect talking.  But I don't think so.  I think we're on the edge of something. 

Zugubal Dancers at the British Museum

Pathway 2: Politics and Protest

Oxlajuj B'aqtun

Origins has always been a political festival, and this year's programme particularly reflects the worldwide indigenous protest against continuing imperialism, economic colonisation, and the destruction of the environment.  Grupo Sotz'il, for example, are performing their great production Oxlajuj B'aqtun, which has been acclaimed across Latin America for its moving response to the genocide committed against the Mayan people of Guatemala, and especially the assassination in 2010 of the group's inspirational founder Lisandro Guarcax.  His words form the epigraph to their work: “We wish that all our efforts will be translated into the knowledge of the others”.

Winona LaDuke

Winona LaDuke, who gives this year's Origins Lecture, is probably the most important Native political leader in the United States.  Founder of the project Honour the Earth, Winona lives on the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota, where she practises an environmentally balanced lifestyle, at the same time as leading the protest against the destruction of indigenous lands, which is a threat not only to indigenous people, but to the whole of humanity.  She has twice stood as the Green candidate for the Vice-Presidency of the United States.  On 15th June, she will speak at Rich Mix about the indigenous approach to ecology, politics and protest in the 21st century.  And, if you want to know more about her, there's a film about her life too, called Thunderbird Woman.  

There are plenty of other talks with a political edge - but the one we'd particularly mention is the Menzies Centre talk with Indigenous Australian writer and campaigner David Milroy.  David has been involved with Origins from its inception, and is always fascinating and entertaining at once when he deal with his passion for Aboriginal land rights and cultural survival.

Standstill

Our film programme is equally uncompromising in its approach to political questions.  Standstill, which opens the film festival on June 10th, find links between the long resistance of the Mohawk people to colonisation, and the current situation of the Palestinian people.  To view the Palestinians as the indigenous subjects of a colonial power throws a whole new light on the conflict there.

Benny Wenda and the Lani Singers

West Papua is another land where the indigenous people are fighting against aggressive colonialism today, and the Festival welcomes their exiled leader Benny Wenda - twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize - to the screening of The Road to Home, a documentary about his remarkable life, and to sing the songs of his native land at The Origins Concert.  Meeting Benny is an experience you will not forget.

Just Another Sámi

Closer to home, the Sámi people of the European Arctic are also engaged in a struggle for land, ecology and culture.   Norwegian company Ferske Scener's Just Another Sámi is a dramatic and musical howl of protest against oppression in lands surprisingly close to home.

Beautiful One Day

The Politics and Protest Pathway reaches through to the closing event of the Festival, brought to London from Australia's Torres Strait Islands by Ilbijerri Theatre Company.  Beautiful One Day is a protest against ongoing racism and the scandal of Aboriginal deaths in custody, starting from one particular death on Palm Island in 2004.  It is also a love letter to an environment and a way of living that somehow endure, in spite of everything.

After the Festival is over, the echoes of protest will remain.  Palpably so, in the form of Elliot Tupac's street art.  Elliott has re-defined mural painting in Latin America with his fusion of indigenous Andean art and the roar of the contemporary city.  Origins brings his work to London, leaving a lasting reminder of the Politics and Protest pathway.