WHAT DO YOU SEE?
WED 19 - SUN 23 JANUARY 2022
Shoreditch Town Hall
PREMIERING AS Part of London International Mime Festival
A huge THANK YOU to our Official Supporters who donated to help make What Do You See? happen. We couldn’t have done this without you!
Jack Wolfe
Parminder Wright
Polly Bennett
Nigel Carter
Margaret Robinson
THE EXPERIMENTS
We gave 9 brilliantly talented creatives the chance to produce a completely new project, their only brief was to answer the question; What Do You See?
You show me yours…
A documentary by Celia Willis and Bea Holland
What do we see when we look at women's bodies? What happens behind the scenes when a group of women and a man look at women's bodies? We invited five brave members of The PappyShow to bare all and spend a day in front of the camera to tell us their thoughts with candid, heartfelt and hilarious results.
Directed by: Celia Willis
Featuring: Marc Benga, Debora Mina, Hayley Konadu, Rachel Hosker, Bea Holland
DOP: Leanne Dimant
Goin Thru It, Man
A short film BY Mohammed Mansaray, Jim Caesar and Eben Figueiredo
In a moment of vulnerability and frustration, three friends open up to each other about the pressures and challenges they face, and how these situations shape them as 'Men’ in society today.
Jim, Mo and Eben sit at Eben’s rooftop, shooting the shit - the same as any other day. When Jim opens up about the trouble’s he’s facing, it sets off a raw and honest dialogue within the group encouraging Mo to mediate and Eben to express his feelings about his faith and how he juggles it all.
“What does it mean to be a man?” “Are these behaviours inherited or Learned?” “What do we expect of ourselves?”
Created by and Featuring: Mohammed Mansaray, Jim Caesar and Eben Figueiredo
DOP & Directed by: Rebecca Doctor
Movement Direction: Kane Husbands
Edited by: Nick Velasco
Sound Mixing: Guy Chase
George Nickel’s 9th Birthday party
A short film by Matthew Rawcliffe
George Nickel's 9th Birthday Party (Official Trailer) is an immersive theatre production which doesn't exist. Fresh from our 9-Month Sold-Out West End run, we invite you to join us for a dance theatre production which follows the story of the Nickel's Family on their son George's 9th Birthday. It's the perfect picture of domestic 70s lifestyle - please dress appropriately.
The video contains flashing lights
Created by: Matthew Rawcliffe
Featuring: Joey Barton, Hannah Miles, Colette Zacca, Jesse
Filmmaker: Aurelia Berg
Music by: Phoebe Parker
Lighting: Jonathon Moore
B in BLACK
A short film by Marc Benga
B in Black ....
The epitome of courage but yet evokes fear …
Of royal status but hunted like no other…
Take a stroll through the jungle and understand from the lion's perspective the implications of being deemed the most dangerous animal around.
Created and curated by: Marc Benga
Featuring: Phao May, Felipe Pacheco, Ruth Newbury-Payton, Adeola Yemitan
Co-written/created by: Aaron Gordon
DOP/Editor: Asilhan Demirci
Music/Voice Recording: Conrad Kira
Through the lens of Visual Vernacular
An annotated photo album by Josie Daxter
What do you see when a story is told through Visual Vernacular?
Josie’s experiment was a day-long workshop with Brian Duffy to explore the principles of Visual Vernacular with a group of hearing and deaf performers.
She was looking for crossovers between Visual Vernacular and The PappyShow’s practice of physical theatre-making and story-based movement. She was asking: what can we learn from Visual Vernacular to expand our practice, enrich our gestural vocabulary and increase the accessibility of our work?
LED BY BRIAN DUFFY, WE SPENT THE DAY EXPLORING THE PRINCIPLES AND FORM OF VISUAL VERNACULAR. LOOKING TO CHALLENGE AND SHIFT THE PAPPYSHOW’S MOVEMENT-BASED PRACTICE AND TO INFORM AND ENRICH OUR PHYSICAL VOCABULARY.
WE EXPLORED THE CINEMATIC QUALITY OF VISUAL VERNACULAR - THROUGH THE INCORPORATION OF LONG SHOTS, PANORAMAS, CLOSE UPS, FAST OR SLOW MOTION AND JUMP CUTS. WE IMPROVISED COLLECTIVELY TO GENERATE CHAIN REACTIONS OF STORY, SHARING AND ADAPTING AND PASSING ON GESTURES FROM ONE PERFORMER TO ANOTHER.
WARM UP EXERCISES TO FIND DEXTERITY IN OUR FINGERS AND RELEASE TENSION (HARD FOR THE HEARING PERFORMERS IN THE GROUP!) LED US TO EXPLORATIONS OF SIMPLE HAND SHAPES AND WHAT THEY COULD REPRESENT.
GESTURES LEAVE TRACES IN THE SPACE. REPEATING THE GESTURE DEEPENS THE TRACE AND REAFFIRMS ITS IMPORTANCE IN THE STORY.
FACIAL EXPRESSION AND GESTURE NEED TO SYNC BUT MAY BE DOING DIFFERENT THINGS. WE EXPLORED USING FACIAL EXPRESSION TO GIVE A SENSE OF TEXTURE - OF A LANDSCAPE, A BUILDING, CLOTHING…
ZOOMING OUT TO SHOW THE CHARACTER IN FINGER FORM
SHIFT THE PLANE THE CHARACTER IS WALKING ON TO MANIPULATE AND PLAY WITH SPATIAL DIMENSIONS
THINK OF YOUR HANDS AS TWO SEPARATE STORYTELLERS, ADDING A GESTURE AT A TIME TO BUILD THE CHAIN OF THE STORY
ROLE SHIFTING TO SWITCH PERSPECTIVE AND SWAP CHARACTERS WHILST STAYING ON THE SPOT. SHIFT YOUR WEIGHT, CHANGE THE ANGLE OF YOUR BODY, AND ALTER YOUR EYELINE.
WORK FROM THE SKY TO THE GROUND WHEN SETTING THE SCENE
PLAYING WITH AMPLIFICATION TO GO FROM SMALL TO BIG, ZOOMING OUT AND ZOOMING IN TO SHIFT PERSPECTIVE. FROM PLAYING THE CHARACTER THROUGH GESTURE TO EMBODYING THE CHARACTER IN YOUR WHOLE BODY.
VISUAL VERNACULAR FEELS LIKE 4K! IT’S PHYSICAL THEATRE IN HIGH DEFINITION, WITH INFINITE LAYERS OF VISUAL DETAIL, SHIFTING DIMENSIONS AND MANIPULATIONS OF SPACE AND TIME.
Curated by: Josie Daxter
Visual Vernacular Artist: Brian Duffy
Interpreters: Erin Hutching and Matt Kyle
Photography by: Korey Ryan
Featuring: Rachel Leah-Hosker, Nadia Nadarajah, Craig Talbot
STRONGER
A filmed movement piece by Jennifer Tang
"I don’t know what I’m looking at.
I never know what I’m looking at."
This experiment focusses on combining music, vocals and text to create a vocal sound score for this evocative text written by Eve Leigh. Asking about the hidden layers and stories that exist deep within our bodies, Manu Hasan composed the music for the lyrical and shattering script, while movement duo Ghost and John helped the company explore a potential physical language to unlock vocal textures. At the heart of this work, this experiment asks whether we ever really know the people who live beneath the skin, and what the echoes and reverberations of their experiences might sound like.
Directed by: Jennifer Tang
Featuring: Ellie Baker, Jazz Rodrigues De Sousa, Hakeem, Rhianne-Louise McCaulsky, Lily Nichol, Jolliff Seville
Music: Manu Hasan
Music Direction: Ghost and John
Photography: Hydar Dewachi
WHAT DO YOU SEE WHEN I’M DANCING
A SHORT FILM BY LEWIS HETHERINGTON
This experiment is about making people to watch a piece of choreography and asking them what do you see?
Lewis and Maryam had a playful and ridiculous morning dancing in Lewis’s back garden, before establishing a set of rules to generate a piece of choreography that felt surprising and silly. He then sent it to different artists and asked them what do you see? Some were asked to describe exactly what they could see, some to try and recreate the dance, and some to play music, or write a poem... Everyone worked alone in their own space, a reflection of collaboration in these locked down times. This short film is a patchwork of the different responses; fragments from all those performances, with glimpses of Maryam's original dance, to see what resonated from one person to the next. What were the connections, the differences, the beautiful surprises?
Creative Lead: Lewis Hetherington
Filmmaker: Naomi Mackay
Featuring: Maryam Hamidi, Benedetta Zanetti, Ellen Renton, Christina Gordon, Isaac Coulton and Oscar Coulton
PORTRAIT OF A VOICE
A short film by Sam Hardie and Debora Minà
In a year of not meeting, Portrait of a Voice brought together ten strangers to meet and connect asking each other 'What do you see in my voice?'.
Five people, the Voices, were asked to respond to prompts to create clues about themselves.
Five people, the Makers, received a box with the clues and had a week to respond to daily devising tasks to create a portrait of the voice allocated to them.
Eventually they gathered on zoom and each pair had the opportunity to meet each other. This film follows the process and tells some of the stories created.
Created by: Sam Hardie and Debora Minà
Editor: Kwami Odoom
Voices: Nicola Barbagli, Scott France, Simran Hunjun, Ursula Mohan, Anya Tavkar
Makers: Sue Mayo, Bianca Stephens, Baker Mukasa, Jordan Scott Silver, Mita Pujara
The creatives
Kane Husbands
Celia Willis
Josie Daxter
Marc Pouani
Lewis Hetherington
Matthew Rawcliffe
Mohammed Mansaray
Jennifer Tang
Debora Minà
Bea Holland
Sam Hardie
This project has been made possible thanks to the support of The Government’s Cultural Recovery Fund & The North Wall Arts Centre.
