Sharing Stages with Chickenshed

The Red Balloon

In our home borough of Enfield, there's an unusual, and very successful, theatre for young people called Chickenshed.  It's a place with some very interesting ideas about diversity, especially in relation to disability, and an interest in theatre that is open and inclusive.  We've had a relationship for some time - curating events there and even touring Consumed into the Studio, as well as complementing that with a youth project led by Lucy.   Dave Carey, their remarkable Director of Creative Development, has written music for two of our shows now.

So it was great to be asked by Dave to become directly involved with the company for a few weeks, as part of their new project Sharing Stages.  The clue's in the name - this is a project about the company's partnerships - although actually very few of these are purely theatrical.  There are partners like Amnesty and Barnado's in the mix.  One other director who has been involved is Lou Stein - famous for founding the Gate - and he's just been announced as the holder of a new post in the theatre, which is its Artistic Directorship.  Interesting times in Enfield....

Our piece, devised with 12 young people (a tiny cast by Chickenshed's standards, and a huge one by ours) is about what it feels like to be a teenager today.  We approached it through their own stories, refracted through one another's telling processes; short scenes written in response to the theme; movement based on statistics we found online.  The result, called The Red Balloon, is a rather beautiful and very intense 10-minute play in three short "movements" - and is very musical.  It's not "about" disability or ethnicity in any overt way - but the presence of disabled and diverse young people within it is key to the way it works.  They don't operate on stage in spite of who they are - what they do and what they mean there is very much about who they are.

It's on till this weekend.

Sunshine on a Rainy Day

We had an amazing day on Saturday, kicking off an exciting new partnership with Chickenshed.  As Dave Carey said in his introduction to the day, it's odd that we should be on this theatre's doorstep, and it took an Australian living in Wales to put us in touch - but thanks to Ian McKenzie-Thurley for seeing the commonalities of interest.  We're all very keen that this relationship should grow.

Sunshine on a Rainy Day was a one-day festival of Southern African culture, held at Chickenshed to complement their play The Rain that Washes, and curated by us.  It's amazing just how much you can cram into one day, if you set your mind to it.  The morning saw two storytelling sessions for children, with Nyemu and Wedzi of World Musik Makers - a Zulu couple who are wonderfully charismatic, and incredibly committed to African culture.  Nyemu tells me that they are now letting out their house in Cambridgeshire to pay for the transportation of equipment to the school they support in Zimbabwe. 

The afternoon started with Idrissa Ouedraogo's film Kini and Adams - a brilliant piece of work which shows relationships collapsing as a mining operation shifts the aspirations of a community.  There was a pretty strong discussion after that - and an even more powerful one in the panel session, Theatre for a Change.  I chaired this, with Arifani Moyo from the Indigeneity project, Christopher Maphosa (on whose life The Rain that Washes is based) and Kate Stafford from Bilimankhwe, who has herself been blogging about the day!  The discussion moved between theatre and politics, theatre for development, theatre and prison, theatre for and by children (in particular CHIPAWO in Zimbabwe), and to the very heart of the post-colonial debate.  It was particularly exciting for us to have the South African High Commissioner, Dr. Z.S.T. Skweyiya, and his wife in the room, and contributing very robustly to the debate.  There was also Dr. Ralph Mguni, the Secretary General of ZAPU, who is awaiting the fall or death of Mugabe before he returns to his Zimbabwean home.  Ralph spoke towards the end of our discussions, and made very clear the importance of cultural activism in the development of the post-colonial space.  For an organisation like ours, working at the interface between intercultural theatre and international policy, this was an inspiring afternoon.

The play, written by Dave Carey with Christopher Maphosa, and performed by Ashley Maynard (pictured) is a solo piece dealing with Christopher's own journey with ZAPU, which took him to Bulgaria with Joshua Nkomo, in preparation for the liberation of Zimbabwe, and then into a nightmare of oppression after the election of Mugabe.  Christopher came to England as a refugee, and his story again underlines the importance of cultural work with refugee communities - it was through working at Chickenshed that he once again found himself a home.  The theatre was packed, and the audience excited!

As if all that wasn't enough, we ended the day with a jazz concert from the great South African trumpeter Claude Deppa.  How exciting was that?