UPROOTED: looking for light in dark times with Red Earth theatre
On March 11, Red Earth Theatre, a Playback Theatre SW company, invites you to an evening orchestrated around the theme UPROOTED: looking for light in dark times.
You may be unfamiliar with the ‘playback method’. It is not a familiar form of drama performance. Rather it involves a ‘director’ – a ’mistress of ceremonies’ of the evening who encourages from those present the telling of life stories that resonate with the theme of the evening. For each story, the skilled actors then represent – ‘replay’– the offered story in one of several ‘playback’ forms.
Evenings with Red Earth are moving, gripping, kind, compassionately challenging and enabling. The company has been in existence for 18 years, working often locally in Totnes as well as elsewhere in the South West and far beyond – training others, linking nationally and internationally around the ‘method’. They have done work highly appreciated by social services with Young Carers, with schools-based, incident-traumatised students, with conferences on life and death, with events focused on climate change or on domestic violence. And for 16 years they have worked regularly, every week, with groups of refugee and asylum-seeking women in Plymouth. The women come for an afternoon – enabled by funded bus fares and student-provided child care and refreshments. They relate stories from present or past life, listening to each other with keen attention and care – and welcoming, relishing or embracing with compassion the stories of others’ lives.
Getting Together
On March 11th Red Earth is focusing on the UPROOTED theme in collaboration with Beyond Borders Totnes & District. This long-established collaboration takes themes from experiences at the heart of lives of displaced people, asylum seekers, refugees – but which also haunt, in maybe less totalizing yet poignant ways, the lives of many among us – and lets us travel with empathy into different aspects of uprooted lives among us.
So the collaborative evenings, focused out of local lives, can echo with emotions resonant of daunting realities of people currently coping with not only violence and persecution forcing them to seek sanctuary – but also the marginalisation, loneliness, grief and trauma they experience once displaced.
Whether waiting in Plymouth or elsewhere in the UK for responses to quests for asylum, whether forced from home within or beyond Sudan or Ukraine, within or beyond Gaza, Eastern DRCongo, Iran, Syria or Kurdistan … uprooted people experience ‘uprootedness’ with pain, suffering and fear, distress and anxiety.
The Main Event
Come and experience Red Earth’s engaging method, insights and compassion on March 11th – 8pm, Bogan House (43 High St, Totnes – opposite the civic square) and let heart and mind be moved.
The evening is a free event to celebrate National Lottery Open Week.