PartSuspended - Current Work

Fringe Review gave Un-Re Strict-ed 4 out of 5 stars.
The piece develops and gradually grows in intensity with real moments of exquisite imagination...
...the theatre becomes a hybrid of poetry, words and pure movements. The performers work well within this medium as an ensemble and as creators.
The abstractness of its conception, the reticence of a language that does not easily give away to meaning reminds of Continental European theatre in the best of its experimentation.

Read the full review here: http://www.fringereview.co.uk/ fringeReview/2945.html or download PDF version.

Un-Re Strict-ed

Experiment 0505009.4
Un-Re Strict-ed poster- Arcola Theatre - Create09 Festival She is trapped in a cage of questions. Locked in adopted thoughts and actions. The demanding city-space soaks body and mind. At times, a fleck of poetry escapes. Images multiply, black, white. An observer steps in, diagnosing and bending the rules. A questioning voice invades the space and restricts her. By holding her back, the voice keeps her stories fragmented and confusing. Will she manage to break out of the confine of questions or will she drown in them?
Un-Re Strict-ed explores restrictions upon identity in the urban environment.

A voice conducts a continual interrogation throughout, becoming increasingly demanding and enveloping performer and audience in a chaos of absurd questions that cannot be answered. In effect, the performance space turns into a claustrophobic interrogation room, where the questions attempt to measure and identify those inside. The inner and outer worlds are brought together by sound-scapes and projected videos & photography, which mould the performers' actions.

Un-Re Strict-ed calls the audience to confront their restrictions: physical, mental, emotional; restrictions imposed by the environment where they grow up, stand up, give up, live in, work in, dive in, hide in, step on, climb on, hold on, leave behind, as well as the restrictions that the audience provoke in themselves and their surroundings.

Another work-in-progress, C.T.S, explores some related themes of life in the city.

When & Where

Gallery

Performance at Arcola Theatre:

Link: Photo gallery at Arcola Threatre (Create09)

Performance at Camden People's Theatre:
Rehearsals/Conceptual:

Credits

Overall concept & facilitation: Hari Marini

Devising Un-Re Strict-ed

Un-Re Strict-ed was borne out of the experience of living, working, moving, loving in the city. We started with talking about our experiences of being restricted: the architecture; the transport; the geography; the social structures and behaviours; our relationships; our expectations and ourselves; all these seemed to have an impact on our decisions and desires.

We each brought different professional experiences: photography, sociology, architecture, engineering, music, and theatre performance. Each member of the group also had a characteristic way of expressing their ideas and feelings - physical, verbal, literary, or practical. Our different backgrounds and ways of expressing ourselves helped to make the devising process surprising and stimulating for us as a group.

Throughout the process, we often had to confront our own and shared limits and limitations. We kept struggling to push ourselves further, to understand, to include, to think, to feel, and at times we stepped back, insisting on staying in our safe 'world', pretending that our weak points did not exist. Collision and synthesis. Destruction and creation.

We found ourselves having the need to create rules, roles and structures and impose them on ourselves, but at the same time we felt the need to scrap them completely and strip them down, to demolish them as insufficient and restricting our intuition and expression.

With special thanks to Kerry Irvine (ScenePool)

Download as a PDF (Devising_UnReStricted.pdf, 110KB)