IN THE LAB

Tell Them That I Am Young And Beautiful

Patrice is play­ing in Tell Them That I Am Young And Beau­ti­ful at the Arcola The­atre in Lon­don. Cre­ated and per­formed by Mar­cello Magni of Com­plic­ité, Kathryn Hunter, Patrice Naiambana, David Bartholomew Soroczyn­ski and Kora player Tunde Jegede. See here for details.

The value of dias­pora aes­thet­ics flow­ing from the sen­si­bil­i­ties of an inter­na­tional cast is one of the high­lights of work­ing on Tell Them That I am Young and Beau­ti­ful. Mar­cello had a won­der­ful vision to tell as sim­ply as pos­si­ble seven sto­ries, how­ever the process was far from sim­ple. How do you move from prose on a page to a per­for­mance lex­i­con of move­ment that for some is not dance but is accom­pa­nied by music (cello and kora), sto­ry­telling with the struc­tural sen­si­bil­i­ties of a writ­ten play. From my African­ist per­spec­tive what we are doing is African per­for­mance with it’s intrin­sic inter-disciplinary approach and impro­visatory DNA. Then again African per­for­mance the­atre is almost invis­i­ble on the Euro­pean stage, unless of course it’s trans­muted through the sen­si­bil­i­ties of Peter Brook or another Euro­pean. I have learnt a huge amount from work­ing with Mar­cello who is to my mind a hugely unac­knowl­edged leader of per­for­mance in Britain. It’s his open­ness to cul­tural dif­fer­ence, work ethic and self-effacing approach as an artist that I value the most. A won­der­ful teacher who refuses to see him­self as such. The run of the mill the­atre star today are so far up their nar­cis­sis­tic bums that they cant even approach Marcello’s poten­tial to truly inspire. Tribal Soul’s chal­lenge is to posit a con­tem­po­rary the­atri­cal state­ment rooted in clas­si­cal griot per­for­mance, with all the rigour of struc­ture but with the unpre­dictabil­ity of a jazz per­for­mance or the trans­for­ma­tive fire of a pen­te­costal church service.

– Patrice