National Theatre Wales 2018 season will have the theme People and Places with the concept of inviting audience members to experience others’ lives.
The season will include a month-long festival to celebrate the 70th birthday of the NHS, two productions reflecting on the migrant experience in and beyond Wales, the first two productions in a three-year cycle of experimental works, and a work-in-progress.
Kully Thiarai, National Theatre Wales’ Artistic Director, said: “Our 2018 season is all about People and Places. We’re inviting audiences to join us in locations across Wales and take a moment to walk in others’ shoes, be they south Asian women or migrants from all over the world, NHS staff or patients past and present.
“These productions will be experimental, political, diverse and provocative. All of them will explore the human condition, what effect places have on our identities, and our impressions of others’ identities. Join us next year for this exciting new season of work, and see Wales, the world and its people through fresh eyes.”
Kully Thiarai
Season details:
National Theatre Wales present
THE STORM CYCLE
Created by Mike Pearson & Mike Brookes
2018-2020
Locations across Wales
Theatre-makers Mike Pearson & Mike Brookes, who have created some of National Theatre Wales’ most critically-acclaimed work to date, will join the company as Associate Artists and begin an extraordinary, three-year collaboration with NTW in 2018.
The Storm Cycle will be a series of six productions conceived, designed and directed by Pearson & Brookes. These multimedia works will be performed at different locations across Wales, at a variety of scales and sizes, and will explore two key themes; truth and testimony. They will culminate in 2020 with the creation of a major, new, large-scale production for NTW’s 10th anniversary programme.
There is a storm coming…
We live in tempestuous times: an era of climatic and environmental uncertainty and of
social and political upheaval. Perhaps it was always so.
But what new forms can theatre develop and adopt: to engage with and to reflect the temper of our times?
An urgent theatre: fit for purpose, addressing and expressing our present realities
Of living in the eye of the storm
The Storm Cycle will build on the approaches and techniques that Pearson & Brookes have brought to their trilogy of groundbreaking NTW productions, The Persians (2010), Coriolan/us (2012) and Iliad (2015), while also drawing on their own histories and experiences as theatre-makers in Wales over the past 40 years.
The works will draw on dramatic, literary, mythological, cinematic and artistic sources; historical and contemporary, local and international, fictional and documentary. They will include original texts, specially-created soundtracks, innovative scenic designs and novel physical activities.
Tickets for the first two productions in the cycle are on sale from today.
STORM.1: NOTHING REMAINS THE SAME will be a poetic yet cinematic reimagining of the first two books of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
Dates: 15-17 February 2018
Time: 8pm
Location: Pafiliwn Bont, Pontrhydfendigaid, Ceredigion
Tickets: £10, £7.50 conc and £5 for preview (15 February)
STORM.2: THINGS COME APART will be a vivid evocation of the Cardiff riots of June 1919
Dates: 21-24 March 2018
Time: 8pm (plus 3pm matinee on 24 March)
Location: The Tabernacl Church, Cardiff city centre
Tickets: £10, £7.50 conc and £5 for preview (21 March)
Box Office
Online:
nationaltheatrewales.org/storm1
nationaltheatrewales.org/storm2
By phone: 029 2037 1689
National Theatre Wales with Junoon present
SISTERS
Created by Kully Thiarai, Sameera Iyengar and other female artists from the South Asian diaspora
Date: 20 April 2018
Time: 8pm
Weston Studio, Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff
Sisters is a conversation across continents about the richness, complexity and diversity of being a south Asian woman today. Stories recalled and half-remembered, embedded in objects, left behind on trains and in airport lounges. Journeys and conversations between women in India and Wales.
Sisters is us at our best, our worst, our strongest, our weakest. Unadorned and visible, we just are.
This all-female work-in-progress by leading British-Asian and Indian artists aims to hold a mirror up to life as a south Asian woman today, wherever she lives; the echoes and the contradictions, the (in)visibility and the comradeship, all told with playfulness, honesty and humour.
Sisters is part of India Wales, a major season of artistic collaboration between the two countries to mark the UK-India Year of Culture, and is supported by British Council Wales, the Arts Council of Wales and Wales Arts International.
National Theatre Wales & Quarantine present
ENGLISH
with Wales Millennium Centre
Part of Festival of Voice 2018
June 2018
Dance House, Cardiff
English is spoken by 1.75 billion people worldwide – that’s one in every four. Non-native speakers far outnumber first-language English speakers.
What happens to your sense of self when you move someplace where you don’t really know how to say who you are?
It’s said that by the end of this century, we’ll have lost more than half the world’s languages. In June, National Theatre Wales – which itself operates in a bilingual country – will collaborate with Quarantine to create a brand new production exploring language, migration and identity, how we learn to speak, and how we learn to listen.
NHS70: A FESTIVAL
July 2018
Locations across Wales
On 5 July 1948, one of the biggest ideas ever to come out of Wales was born. The brainchild of Ebbw Vale MP and the UK’s Health Minister Aneurin “Nye” Bevan, the National Health Service was a revolutionary idea, formed along with the Welfare State during Britain’s austere post-war period, and under the principle of collective responsibility.
National Theatre Wales will celebrate the NHS’s 70th birthday in July 2018 with a month-long festival, inspired by some of the founders, staff and patients of this unique institution. This countrywide tribute to the NHS will feature seven multi-platform productions and events, made and performed live across the country and online:
1. Theatre company Oily Cart will create Splish Splash; a multi-sensory, underwater, touring production for young people aged 3-19, performed in schools and hospitals. There will be three versions: one for those with profound and multiple learning disabilities, another for those on the autism spectrum, and a third for the deafblind. Their aim is to present a watery wonderland, a magical space where every sense is delighted. Hydro-therapy pools will be transformed by underwater lighting, clouds of bubbles drifting from below, curtains of perfumed spray, and live music played on floating pipes, with a sound that can be felt as much as heard.
Splish Splash George Panda
2. Love Letters to the NHS will be a series of five, new, solo shows written by five writers and performed in community spaces the length and breadth of Wales. These extended monologues will be intimate, heartfelt love letters to an institution with which all of us have had – or will have – a relationship, at some stage of our lives.
3. National Theatre Wales will team up with arts organisation Migrations, French choreographer and dancer Julie Nioche and choreographers Filiz Sizanli and Mustafa Kaplan from Turkey, to create Touch, a site-specific, interactive and tactile dance piece about the therapeutic aspects of dance and the social place of the body. Made and performed in a medical facility in north Wales, the piece will be made with local, professional and non-professional dancers.
Migrations Artistic Director Karine Décorne
4. Gruff Rhys, solo artist as well as a singer and songwriter with Super Furry Animals and Neon Neon, will write, record and release a new song paying tribute to the NHS on its 70th birthday. Keep an eye on NTW’s website for more information about where and when to hear it first.
5. Laughter is the Best Medicine will be a night of comedy, compèred by actor and comedian Elis James, at the Lyric Theatre in his hometown of Carmarthen
6. Following National Theatre Wales’ 2017 listening project, in which they gathered stories about people’s experiences with the NHS in Wales, one of the seven events will be a participative, live event reflecting the breadth of experiences and stories told from across Wales. This event will incorporate digital storytelling, sound and music, and celebrate the human stories that put the heart into our National Health Service. It’s not too late to send in your stories about your experiences (as a patient, relative or staff member) of the NHS in Wales. Get in touch…
· by visiting nationaltheatrewales.org/nhs70 and filling in an online form
· by post to National Theatre Wales, 30 Castle Arcade, Cardiff CF10 1BW
· on Facebook at facebook.com/nationaltheatrewales, or
· by leaving the company a message on your preferred social media platform using the hashtag #MyNHS70
7. NTW will commission a visual artist to make a new work inspired by the volume of data generated by NHS Wales. This work could sit in a museum, online, a found space, a hospital site or somewhere we have yet to imagine. More information about this opportunity can be found at www.nationaltheatrewales.org/nhs70-open-call-artists.
National Theatre Wales present
THE TIDE WHISPERER
Written by Louise Wallwein
Directed by Kully Thiarai
Designed by Camilla Clark
September 2018
Tenby, Pembrokeshire
An immersive experience written by poet and playwright Louise Wallwein, The Tide Whisperer will tackle the global phenomenon of displacement and mass movement. Record numbers are on the move all over the world. What is it like to leave your home, and to live with the uncertainty of ever finding another?
The Tide Whisperer is full of stories, forever a nomad, having travelled the oceans and been carried by the tide to fresh new shores.
On the shores of Tenby, the audience gathers. The tide is turning fast and a storm is coming. The future feels uncertain – humanity is on the move and seeking refuge. Will we be met by kindness or rejection; offered sanctuary or forced to survive the perilous, treacherous sea?
The Tide Whisperer, in which audiences will take to the sea to explore the coast of Pembrokeshire by boat, will be made with a leading Welsh creative team including award-winning composer John Hardy, sound designer Mike Beer and theatre designer Camilla Clark, who grew up in the area.
https://www.nationaltheatrewales.org/news/media/ntw-2018-season/publicity
#NTW2018
Main image Gruff Rhys.
I hope that many Welsh writers companies and performers will be involved in these productions. It’s great to embrace the world but there don’t seem to be much that is Welsh here apart from the wonderful Mikes!