If you come across a group of people in a classroom shaking like a leaf or attempting to be a tree in a forest fire, or a whale on two legs – it might seem like an exorcism in process to your bewildered eyes. However, you are most likely to be witnessing a movement-based class…
Live Art makes space for experimental processes, practices, bodies and identities that are perhaps excluded from conventional contexts. More than being a specific form or discipline, live art is a way of thinking about art, what it can do and how it can be experienced. It can be in a gallery, a theatre, a city…
Artistic expression has long played a crucial role in how we learn, teach, communicate and heal. As per the World Health Organization, health is a “state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” The global body has also funded over 3000 studies investigating the role of…
Kicking off the Season 5 of Unrehearsed Futures, we had guest curator Illia Abeliashev, an active member of the Vakhteri playback group from Ukraine in conversation with fellow Ukrainian playback artists Alisa Volkova and Olena Kalashnykova. Emphasising on theatre’s role in social transformation, this season we look at how we can transition from dialogue to…
It was December 2007. Kenyan storyteller, dramatist, orator and theatre-maker Ogutu Muraya was in busy pursuing his higher studies in international relations and diplomacy with an interest in environmental studies when the violence in his country broke out. Kenya was in the middle of a contentious presidential election that year. The then-Opposition-leader Raila Odinga (who…
As the spectre of genocide increases in Gaza, we at Unrehearsed Futures took this opportunity to pause and reflect on the role that art can play in shaping vital public discourse about the stakes and nature of justice. In conversation with Palestinian-American writer and editor Lisa Suhair Majaj and South African composer, sound artist, librettist…
If it’s in the way, it is the way. – Frank Anderson, IFS trainer A lot of theatre training practices around the world, especially embodied practice spaces, emphasise on the mind-body split polarity. They ask one to “get out of the head”, “stop thinking” and “get into your body”. Given the kind of systems one…
After a rejuvenating conversation with Ieva Česnulaitytė last month around active citizenship and participatory democracy, we at Unrehearsed Futures returned to Brazilian practitioner Augusto Boal and his body of work with the Theatre of the Oppressed, to investigate how we could revisit his powerful ideas today. A theatre-maker and political activist, Boal elaborated on his…
For all practitioners who’ve been in a devising rehearsal room, the rehearsal space often has elements of democracy playing out – participation, ensuring inclusive agency, making space for multiple voices and multiple opinions and more. However, when we think of democracies around the world today, citizen empowerment may not be the first thing that comes…
The day is 6 March 2020. It’s the day Ghana became independent in 1957. Celebrations are galore. A festival is going on inside the Baba Yara Sports Stadium, in Kumasi, a city of more than 3 million people that was once the capital of the Ashanti Empire. The president of Ghana also happens to visit….