Label it Dramaturgy: Joe Sellman-Leava @ Edfringe 2016

Worklight Theatre Presents

Labels

by Joe Sellman-Leava | directed by Katharina Reinthaller

designed by Charlotte Anderson | lighting & sound by Phill Hewit produced by Michael Woodman

Worklight Theatre’s multi-award winning show is a funny, moving and honest story about mixed heritage and immigration. Charting a childhood in 90s' Devon, shifting political landscapes and global refugee crisis, the show uses comedy, storytelling and spoken word. Expect paper planes, racist romances and lots of sticky labels! 

Using humour and honesty, Labels offers a human story from multicultural Britain, and is touring the UK after an award-winning Australian tour and London run.

What was the inspiration for this performance?
Initially it was a workshop on racism, which Emma Thompson led. The first draft came from there. Then in 2015, (after several short performances of the initial idea, and years of thinking about), I felt that the voices of the far-right had become so loud I wanted to redevelop the show entirely, so it could go to Edinburgh and tour the UK.

How did you go about gathering the team for it?
It was a result of talking (sometimes non-stop) to friends and colleagues. I was introduced to Katharina Reinthaller by a mutual friend (director Jessica Beck), who worked as director and dramaturg for Labels; us collaborating together was what really transformed the show into what it is now. Katharina brought lighting and sound designer Phil Hewitt on board. 

Michael Woodman, who runs Worklight Theatre with me, started working on Labels as a producer. And Charlotte Anderson, who we'd worked with on many projects years before, worked as set & costume designer, and stage manager. Having a close team, who were so close to the project, made a huge difference.

How did you become interested in making performance?
I had some incredible teachers (in and out of school) who encouraged and challenged me in equal measure. There was a real buzz in working through the challenges and pitfalls of performance-making and coming out the other side with something you're proud of. That, and the camaraderie within the teams you work with on these projects is also what kept me coming back for more!

Was your process typical of the way that you make a performance?
For Labels I spent a lot more time writing independently than I previously had, since Worklight's previous shows were both devised. However, the process of workshopping and text at every stage - as we had before - remained at the heart of it. 

And we've always done a lot of scratches, sharing, and work-in-progress shows as part of process, which in this case were really invaluable, as so much of the show relies on the relationship between audience and performer.

What do you hope that the audience will experience?
We want them to laugh, cry and think! Although the show's content is highly personal, we hope it's much more outward looking than it seems. The idea is by retelling my own experiences of racism, and framing them within imagery and questions around labelling, people reflect on their own views and experiences. 

What strategies did you consider towards shaping this audience experience?
The show is interactive a few specific ways: namely, me sticking labels onto both myself and the audience, and a section where an audience member reads racist messages someone sent me on Tinder! 

We also wanted everyone to feel included in the story throughout: eye contact with as many audience members as possible is essential from our perspective, and we developed the show to suit a thrust space with the audience on three sides, so that a strong connection was made from the word go.

Do you see your work within any particular tradition?

It might be too early to say that, since Labels is my first full length play and Worklight's third full-length show. But storytelling a really vital part of the show and work I/we have made before, and obviously that's a fairly ancient tradition! 

But to be a little more specific, I'm personally a huge fan of artists like Bobby Baker and Spalding Gray, where the relationship between personal and political is at the centre of their work. 

Sterotype Dramaturgy: Vivian.C.Ezugha @ Buzzcut

Vivian Chinasa Ezugha was born in Nigeria, Enugu state in 1991. She graduated from Aberystwyth University, School of Art with a first class BA in Fine Art. Before that Ezugha was at Halesowen College fine art foundation 2010-2011.

To  start the conversation about the project; I am interested in how history is performed by society and by individuals.  For that reason, I am drawn to the image of the Mammy as a service provider, an object that provides a service. In that I am working with the concept of being a mother type; a black body that serves as a reminder of historical and social prejudices. 

So for example, I've been developing a series of photographs, films (bad quality films) and drawings using simple objects like tables, chairs and materials like milk. So these objects connect to my understanding of the role of the black female as a mammy, many mammies breast fed their white masters children. 

Yet in the dichotomy of being black in a racist society, many of these women (mammies) were never given the rights and respects they deserved. So in that, I use the milk as a symbol of motherhood but distort the activity of feeding with spilling because in my mind the process of breast feeding is to feed and give love, nutrient etc however, the value of that process is wasted when the body that received it grows to abuse the feeder. 

In addition, black women were used as sexual objects. somehow , there's a fear and there's still a fear of the black body. I play with this by being naked in my own flesh but at the same time clothing

myself with the history of western misogyny. 

My creative process is somewhat difficult, I read what I want and by doing this filter information, then I start to create images in my mind and by doing this, I start creating a performance. Then I draw those performances that then inform and direct how I play with movement in the physical. Sometimes I store the ideas in my mind and go straight into physical play. 

The jezebel archetype is somewhat of a mixture between biblical knowledge of Queen Jezebel and the notion that black bodies were seen by their white counterparts as promiscuous and illusive characters. 

Queen Jezebel in the bible was a woman full of evil, sin and somewhat strong. But her downfall was her inability to look beyond the physical and with a hardened heart of sin , drove Israel and her husband to sin. 

The black woman during the slave period was seen as a woman of sinful ways. she was abused but was told that it was because she was a sinner and a whore. Though she didn't chose to be a whore, her body which was deemed sinful was a playground for those upright white males; who in their cleanliness had to purify the black pit with their semen. 

 I've been playing around in the studio with the dichotomy of black illusiveness in today's society. This is a formed notion that comes out of a racist and a bastard western perverseness around the bodily functions of black women's bodies. 

So 'Twerking' a word that stripes the culture and identity of a dance form that stems from our African heritage. a form that goes beyond the  sexualisation of the female buttocks but is in fact an expression, a pride and freedom of our ancestral movement. twerking is also an appropriation of black identity and in that many arses have gone up and down  in a bid to exemplify some form of power. 

Yet centuries before black women -i.e. Sara Bartram was exhibited and misused for the size of her behind. I  hear the contradiction of the immoral and the moral. 

I love and honour every race of people but I am defined by a history that is not mine or my ancestors, I as a black woman, I  am expected to keep quite or be  angry. I am not expected to use the literal depictions that were created by the system in the land in which I dwell in , to challenge the notion of my identity and the characteristics of that identity. 

So in this , I will create a performance that has all the recognisable archetypes of the mammy image and Jezebel. 

mammies & jezebels from vivian ezugha on Vimeo.

I am a float in a sea of social ridiculousness, a sharp knife that cuts through the womb of bullshit. My focus is to politicize the politics of the black female, to make it relevant to our social and political conscious, to reinvent what is known, to remind us of the past and take us into the future...

My method is performance, the root of experience. I look to create and disseminate the history around black women. I use one thing... that is my body and sorely my body, because as an object my body is as political as this statement.