Only a week to go until Afrovibes, a festival celebrating South African culture, takes over Deptford with award-winning theatre, music and dance. As part of the festival, our associate company Chill Pill have headed to Amsterdam to work with the South African artists of The Revivalists, where they will sample sections from four well-known plays and transform them to make statements about their identities. The Revivalists will have its only UK performance with us on Friday 17 October, 7.30pm. Chill Pill poet Adam Kammerling lets us know how rehearsals are progressing in Amsterdam so far:
What links Chekov’s The Cherry Orchard, Euripides’ The Bacchae, Henry Ibsen’s The Enemy Of The People, Maria Stuart by Schiller and Shakespeare’s Othello? Answer on a postcard please.
Me and long time Chill Pill compadre, Stephanie Turner, are all up in Amsterdam working on a show called The Revivalists. It’s a theatre show that aims to find the answer to the above question. The Revivalists are a crew of incredible South African artists, all from different disciplines, reviving classic texts in their own styles, telling their personal stories through monologues in the aforementioned texts. A narrative has emerged organically over the process of development and the show is getting pretty epic.
The experience has been deep in a thousand ways for a thousand reasons. Firstly, theatre practice is SERIOUSLY different to the life of isolated key bashing/pen scratching that us poets inhabit. There’s more sweating. More dancing. More trusting.
Secondly, the vision of Maarten van Hinte and Marjorie Boston, and the current cast is huge. The span of themes being pulled in through the filter of these texts is amazing. The process of cyphering allows everything in to interact with everything else. If you have an idea, you realise it as fully as possible and then the group decides if and how it can play out in the entire piece. The process is a conversation of short works (and then actual conversations) between all the artists. It makes for the richest and most creative space I have ever worked in.
We rolled up to a fashion event on Sunday and ran a short extract of the piece. The other performers, who are mainly theatre makers, are all seriously amazing and we blew some unsuspecting minds. First full run is this weekend and we’ll be doing the show at the Albany on the 17th. We can’t wait.
Meanwhile, back in the land of London, the rest of the gang have sorted out some cracking acts for our parties in the Township Cafe during Afrovibes UK. Not to mention our Chill Pill show on the 16th, featuring South Africa’s own Toni Stuart and London Zulu. I am very excited.
Right. Back to rehearsals.
PEACE
Adam Kammerling, Poet, Chill Pill
Chill Pill will perform with The Revivalists artists throughout the week of Afrovibes festival at three different events: Chill Pill Plus… (Wednesday – Friday 17 October, 8.30pm), Chill Pill: Afrovibes (Thursday 16 October, 7.30pm) and The Revivalists (Friday 17 October, 7.30pm).
For more information about Afrovibes and to book tickets, click here.
The Albany, Deptford 