DESCRIPTION

TECHNICAL NEEDS

KEY ARTISTS

PARTICULARS

APPROVED PHOTOS

PERSONNEL

LOGOS

The Experience

The artists invite two audience-participants – a black woman and a friend of her choice – to re-embody and re-create Dan Wynn’s iconic portrait
of Dorothy Pitman-Hughes and Gloria Steinem. The participants pose
for this photo, see the photo in real time, and talk to each other and the artists about female friendship, feminism, racism and things that are
hard to talk about. The re-creation of this image acts as a ritual to open space for uncomfortable, challenging, transformative conversation. These experiences last about one hour and are video/audio documented.

THE EXHIBITION

The resulting portraits and recordings from the experience and the live documentary will form an interactive visual exhibition comprising of photographs, audio and video.

THE LIVE PERFORMANCE

This is a multimedia performance for flexible spaces and larger audiences, created and performed by the artists following a series of facilitated experiences as above. Using the documentation from the experiences, they edit audio and visuals separately and play them in ‘sync’ for the first time in front of the audience, while they appear onstage in front of the screen, creating shadows, silhouettes and both physically and verbally commenting on the film. This is followed by a talkback.

THE BOOK

The artists are also working on a handbook for creative interracial collaboration.

PARTICULARS

SPACE REQUIREMENTS:

• For workshops and photographs: 22’ X 22’ x 26’

• For display of photographs/looped video: exhibition/gallery space

• For performance/video screening: studio theatre with film projector/screen

PROCESS

• Session with each couple lasts approximately 90 minutes

• Suitable for adults and teenagers

• Number of contributors is dependent on each context/budget (approx 3 portraits per day)

PERSONNEL

Traveling Company:

• 2 artists/photographers

• 1 videographer/editor

• 1 project assistant

Local:

• 1 Community Organizer

TOTAL - 4 Traveling, 1 Local

TECHNICAL NEEDS

APPROVED PHOTOS

LINK TO FOLDER HERE

LOGOS

OCTOPUS THEATRICALS LOGO

ANNA-MARIA NABIRYE

Anna-Maria Nabirye is a multi-disciplinary artist who performs, collaborates and initiates projects across fiction, documentary, theatre, screen, visual arts and fashion. She is interested in amplifying the stories of marginalised peoples with an emphasis on Black Women in the western Diaspora.

As a collaborative artist /performer she has co-directed/devised Ruptures (London Film Festival/Home), Hold Your Ground- Film and Video Umbrella & The Paper Man (Improbable Theatre).
Her own projects include Motherhoody (with Jess Mabel Jones, Albany 2019), Up In Arms currently in development (with Annie Saunders),

No Word For A Pier In Lusoga (De La Warr Pavilion), Strong & Wrong (Brighton/Edinburgh Fringe) & AFRORETRO; a creative entity which tells stories of the diaspora through upcycled fashion and textiles (commissioned by Royal Court, V&A, SBC, Brighton Museum and awarded Yinka Shonibare’s Guest Projects residency).

Recent acting roles includes Mephisto [A Rhapsody] (The Gate 2019), Les Blancs (National Theatre) and Macbeth/Boudica/A Midsummer Night’s Dream (The Globe), Informer, Collateral (BBC).

Anna-Maria has developed relationships combining roles as actor, collaborator, and co-director with; Half Moon YPT, Imogen Knight, METIS-Zoe Svendsen, Noor Afshan Mirza and Brad Butler. She is currently works with LPO creating a communication programme for their Junior Artist mentorship for underrepresented musicians.

ANNIE SAUNDERS

Annie Saunders is a director and live artist. Her company, Wilderness,
has presented The Day Shall Declare It in a disused warehouse in the Downtown Los Angeles Arts District with Los Angeles Performance Practice and in London with Theatre Delicatessen in the former BBC Studios and the Bush Theatre. The company has also presented work
at The Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival, REDCAT, the 14th Factory, The Broad Stage, the San Francisco Playhouse and the Getty Villa. She is a core performer with Lars Jan’s Early Morning Opera, and has appeared in Holoscenes, The Institute of Memory (TIMe), and Abacus. She was a participant in the 2017/18 Devised Theater Working Group for next-generation performance-makers at the Public Theater in New York.

Annie Saunders has also devised and performed original work in the UK with Neil Bettles (Frantic Assembly, Thickskin) and Gemma Fairlie (RSC) on Full Stop, a co-commission for the Lyric Theatre, Watford Palace, Greenwich Festival and Latitude. She holds an MA in literature and critical studies from the University of London, and trained at the Sanford Meisner Center for the Arts, the American Conservatory Theater and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. She worked for ten years as a creative activist with Eve Ensler’s V-Day.