By BRUCE DENNILL
Circle Song, written and performed by Ashley Dowds and directed by Caroline Calburn is a story about re-membering: Two Irishmen leave the shore of Northern Ireland to search for a new sense of belonging; a letter written back in 1864 is found in an old trunk; a woman wakes up from a coma, inside a moment of time when she was a 15 year old girl…
In the lead-up to a new production, how do you prepare:
– Physically…
With a solo show, there’s a little more attention to endurance! Being on stage for 65 minutes is a physically embodied reality that takes no prisoners – you need to keep fit and consciously healthy.
– Mentally…
Part of it is the ‘musical notation’ that a dancer or a musician must feel too. The story is a world of structure that has to be rehearsed into muscle memory – without it becoming too fixed.
– …And emotionally?
Learning the structure and momentum of the story helps you to lean into the emotion, and then inside that space, there is the ‘moment’ filled with the circumstance, the cause and effect and the visual imagination – the ‘nation of images’? – to engage with.
What is the single most influential performance you’ve ever seen – the one that made you feel: “This is what I want to do with my life!”?
There are too many to mention, so I’ll grab the most recent: David Viviers’ performance in Moffie at The Baxter was sublime. It appears effortless and light. His grasp of story and momentum builds in a way that is inhabited and engaging because he flits from moment to moment so poetically.
What is your favourite aspect of the industry – be it specific people, parts of the production process, particular venues/locations or something else?
We are all involved with story – the essential aspect of being human. Audiences willingly – sometimes under sufferance, if they’re dragged out to see a show by their partner! – enter a world that begins to reach into emotional layers that they may not have realised lie beneath the surface. Or more simply, they become part of a shared experience that is beyond the ordinary.
What is an aspect of the industry that you feel could be improved (even if that’s only an idealistic wish)?
Artists in South Africa do not have the kind of support from government that we would hope for. It means there is a very insecure basis for a freelance existence.
What has been your scariest onstage/on set moment so far (anything from forgetting words or cues to accidents or other unforeseen events)?
Recently I was warming up on stage and became intrigued by a book on the set (Breytenbach) and absent-mindedly wandered off with it afterwards. There came a time in the course of the performance when a secret note that had been slipped into the book (pre set!) was needed. It was part of the story. The actors improvised magically, but there was sheer panic behind the set: “Where is that book?” I think it only hit me when I was driving home after the show and I had to stop the car and breathe. I had taken it!
Tell us about your current production, and what makes your character interesting to play?
The story is told in fragments from collected family stories, letters and inventions. So the central ‘character’ is a narrator who moves in between moments in time – themselves carried by the characters who inhabit them. Circle Song is a memory piece. Not quite play or monologue, not quite story-telling, it is spoken to the audience from a narrator’s perspective across an arc of time. Sometimes it is from the voices of people, re-imagined in the past, who left the shores of Ireland and England to begin a life in South Africa. But it rests on the story prompted by a real life event: After a severe brain operation, my mother wakes to the world as a 15-year-old version of herself.