The company I work with, London Bubble, run a lot of activities where people connect through stories. Working with all ages we mediate creative spaces that offer an opportunity to create, or re-tell stories. I don't want to over-claim but the simple act of sitting in a circle and attending to someone performing a story is often therapeutic. We know from evaluations that children who do not otherwise speak in school, not only speak in these conditions they weave stories. Through stories problems are shared, messages are sent, solutions are rehearsed and narratives are invented that allow us to be ridiculous and to escape the everyday. We call it theatre, someone recently described the outcome as accidental therapy.
Mostly we do that in South East London, but at the moment we’re working on a world story. The story of Hiroshima. A true story of the first deployment of the atom bomb, 70 years ago.
It feels a bit to me as though Hiroshima is a person – and this person has a story, a story of being attacked, suddenly, violently, and experimentally. Hiroshima wants to share this story, partly to process it, partly to warn others – just like we all want to tell our friends about the things that happen to us.
Over the past year, Marigold Hughes the project leader has trained and supported children in Hiroshima to interview survivors of the bomb. Twenty-five interviews have been transcribed, workshopped, and shaped into a script by Misaki Setoyama.
Although the script will be performed in Hiroshima this August it seemed to us that the story needed a wider circle of listeners and that Hiroshima itself needed to share this story with others beyond Japan. But the act of sharing needed to be intimate, to allow the story to work on a human scale, to connect as we connect in those small circles of listening empathisers.
So we have issued an invitation to small companies like ourselves in other parts of the world asking them to mount a reading of the script. To arrange a small act of listening, and consideration and empathising with Hiroshima. Seven readings, one for each of the seven rivers of Hiroshima, are planned - in Pune in India, in Wimborne in Dorset, in South Africa, on Bohol Island in the Philippines, at Bubble in London, at First Stage in Milwaukee and at Yes Theatre on the West Bank in Palestine. On Hiroshima Day, the 6th August these groups will read Misaki’s script and lay out clothes in the shape of the seven rivers of Hiroshima.
As these small rivers flow into the sea, our hope is that next year each of the seven companies might contact seven others, who the following year contact seven more. And that this continues for seven years - small companies, sharing the script with the younger generation who may not know the story of Hiroshima but might be prepared to listen.
Drama is a moment of connection between human beings.
ReplyDeleteWhether they be separated by a few feet and a stage or a few hundred miles and a computer screen.
London Bubble has done something profound yet simple (as most profound things often are) by first making the 'Grandchildren of Hiroshima' Project happen and then by extended an invitation to the world to come and partake Hiroshima's story. Through them, a page-worth of information read years back in our history text-books has become a living, breathing story 70 years in the making.
Orchestrated Q'works is ridiculously excited (we are literally shouting from the roof-tops here) to be a part of Hiroshima Dispersed - to be part of a circle that gathers to hear a tale, across borders, across decades, across generations.
Wimborne Community has specialized in creating site-specific theatre with adults and young people since 1991. Our work is devised collectively by participants, inspired by local places and the documented stories of people living in the region, past and present, real and fictional. Currently, we’re involved in developing a long term theatre project about the continuing impact of the First World War on the lives of local people – and how it has affected future generations.
ReplyDeleteSo we are very excited to be involved in this inter-cultural global project, which will help us think beyond our own histories towards our integral connection with the rest of the world. The moving stories of the people of Hiroshima challenge our sense of propriety, normality, fairness and justice.
Wimborne Community Theatre’s reading will take place on an area of grass outside the ancient Minster in Wimborne town centre, the site of graves from much earlier centuries. In the shadow of a War Memorial commemorating Wimborne men who died in both World Wars, this simple act of public storytelling will help us reflect on the world today and how we can learn from the words of witnesses, victims, survivors.