productions

'The Golden Years Are Now'

The Golden Years Are Now - development trailer from Cara Dinley on Vimeo.

debut development for illumine hybrid theatre in Cyprus - September, 2017

‘The Golden Years Are Now’ was provoked by the Henrik Ibsen classic ‘Hedda Gabler’, in conjunction with ‘Homer’s Hymn to Demeter’.

In a world where the subconscious bleeds and time and space are fluid, the woman Hedda Gabler is re-imagined, her unborn child watches from a different dimension. This fragmented fairytale reaches inside the bodies of these characters revealing their deepest desires and flickers of ancient memory. A friendly competition turns sour, unearthing remnants of an everlasting history. Mother and Daughter finally meet each other and find their story together, the story that started all of this. Songs of mourning bring a fractured family back together.

The auteur, Cara Dinley, describes the work as “physically driven” and explains that "it’s not dance, it’s not circus, the physical movement is what I would call heightened-it is accompanied by multi-lingual text, an electronic soundscape and raw vocalisation.” Saale Kreen, Estonian cast member and musical collaborator, called the work “multi-dimensional poetry.” Dinley notes how important the presence of the female voice and female gaze is, for the health of the community and the artistic landscape.

The cast of four come from France, Finland, Estonia and Cyprus. The costume designer/theatreologist is from Greece and lighting designer from Poland. This work will require an additional development phase in order for it to be developed into an entire work. Showings of this stage of the development will be open to the public on 29 & 30 September, at Mitos Performing Arts Centre. The audience will be invited to give their feedback to the creative team following each showing.

29 September @ 8pm & 30 September @ 5pm (30 min duration)
Admission 5 euro each, tickets at the door.
Venue: Old Vinegar Factory, Genethliou Mitella 34, 3036 Lemesos, Cyprus.
Cast: Anu Almagro, Saale Kreen, Yorgos Onisiforu & Julien Touati

Electronic Music: Doris Hallmägi and Saale Kreen
Adapted motif from Forgotten People's "Karelian Destiny" Veljo Tormis
Costume Designer: Myrto Sarma
Lighting Designer: Lukas Walewski

cast & creatives

biographies

Cara Dinley writer, director

Anu Almagro - hedda-demeter

Anu Almagro (Salonen) is a Finnish Actress and Acting teacher performing and teaching internationally around the globe. Her interest in performance work, deeply rooted in cultural traditions and born out of authentic and energetic connection between people, drove her to Poland the first time in 2004. In 2007 she became a member of Song of the Goat Theatre (Teatr Piesn Kozła,) an international award winning theatre company based in Wrocław, Poland and a teacher of the company's unique 'coordination' technique. She created her own theatre company Odra Ensemble which trained and performed in Wroclaw, Poland between 2011 and 2013. Her Finland based company Anu Almagro Actor Training follows invitations to share profound and holistic acting technique workshops with professional theatre makers as well with students throughout the world. Anu holds two MA's in Acting, with Manchester Metropolitan University, UK, (2010) and University of Tampere, Finland, (2006). She is a founding member of the Finnish chapter of Clowns without borders, a non profit organization, bringing laughter, clown performance, music and workshops for children all around the world in places of crisis. She is also a proud mother of Freya.

Saale Kreen - the nymph-persephone

Saale Kreen (b.1988) is a choral conductor from Estonia. She has finished Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre in Choral Conducting (MA) in prof. Toomas Kapten’s class and is now working with mixed choirs, amongst them NUKU Choir (Estonia) which explores the common grounds between choral music and theatre. In 2017 she participated in an acting course in Bral School of Acting on coordination technique and composed music for the course's final performance “Mystic letters”.

Yorgos Onisiforu - the drunk-zeus

Performer, born in 1987 in Paramytha, Cyprus. He graduated from the National Drama School of Greece in Athens, from the Greek Philology Department (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and Paris-Sorbonne V). Most recently he spent six months training at the Bral School of Acting in Wroclaw of Poland (Song of the Goat Theatre). He has worked as an actor and singer in various performances in Greece, Cyprus, Germany and Poland. In 2016 he performed his solo piece, The Story of Soldier Woyzeck, in Cyprus and Greece. He studied Alexander Technique under the tutelage of Vicky Panagiotaki.

Julien Touati - the lawyer-hades

Julien Touati (France) is a training comedian who discovered Kathakali in 2004 and spent four years training at Kottakkal in India. In 2009, he felt the need to merge this unique training experience with contemporary stage forms. He created AVS Road Company which performed works like "And I want," "Anywhere I lay my head," and "The book of love." In 2010, he co-directed the film "The Table With the Dogs" which won the Immaterial Cultural Heritage Award at Festival Jean Rouch. It was also selected and awarded at several other international festivals. As a performer, Julien has worked with companies like Prana, theater performances like "Femme Non-Rééducable," and films directed by Maria Pinto. He has also danced with choreographer Alban Richard in France. Most recently, he joined the Song of the Goat Theatre in Poland for "Crazy God » and « Hamlet, a commentary ». Summer 2017, Julien is one of the 10 dancers/choreographers of OMI International dance residency in New York.

Doris Hallmägi - electronic music composition

I've been inside music and learning it most of my life, studying a little bit of violin and singing in choirs while growing up in Estonia. Urge to know more led me to technology and computers, after which I was taken back to music again. It was then I discovered electronic manipulation of acoustic sounds, which is something that I'm exploring and playing around more now. I'm yet to find out what's next.

Myrto Sarma - theatreologist, costume designer

Lukas Walewski - lighting designer, performance space

A Divergent Herstory Pt. 1

CREDITS

Created in collaboration by Lucy Ansell, Cara Dinley, Sarah Fitzgerald and Magda Miranda

Performed by Lucy Ansell, Sarah Fitzgerald, Magda Miranda

Concept Design and Direction by Cara Dinley

Special thanks to Felix Ching Ching Ho

Photo credit: Vivian Cooper Smith

a note to the audience about A Divergent Herstory Pt. 1

What happens if some kind of break has occurred in our ancestry that cuts our connection to either the people, the places or both?

How do we find stories and information about the past that have not been written or passed down orally?

Cellular (body) memory provides an alternative source.

Research has shown that memory can be passed down through generations, which can inform certain parts of the body—its postures and behaviour. Our lived experience, whether we can remember it or not, is stored in our bodies and also affects our postures.

Embryology teaches that the heart develops before the brain and a female creates eggs which could become grandchildren—not their children. We, our eggs, were created in part by our grandmothers.

What does all of this say about the presence of our matrilineal heritage inside our bodies? We have sought to trace the stories inside our body’s cellular memory through sensorial,somatic, ‘body first’ practice to develop A Divergent Herstory Pt. 1.

This work explores an embodied, experimental theatre development incorporating an intergenerational group of all-female artists.

The initial provocation asked “How does your lived experience differ to that of your mother’s and grandmother’s?”

Inside an ambiguous temporal space, intimate stories told through the voice of the body and the body of the voice will feature, intersect with others, and meld together...finding connection in difference.

biographies

Director & Concept Design

Cara Dinley

Performer-Makers

Lucy Ansell

Lucy’s recent credits at the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) include John Proctor in The Crucible (dir. Adena Jacobs), Fortune Teller in The Skin of Our Teeth (dir. Dean Bryant), Westmoreland in Henry V (dir. Leith McPherson), Clytemnestra in The Greeks (dir. Melanie Beddie) and Nina in The Seagull (dir. Budi Miller), which she later performed at the Asia Pacific Bond Theatre Schools Festival and Directors Conference in Shanghai, 2017. In 2017, Lucy was the recipient of the Orloff Family Charitable Trust Scholarship for excellence.

Sarah Fitzgerald

Sarah’s theatre credits include Sabina in The Skin of Our Teeth (dir. Dean Bryant) Lulu #1 in Don’t Bring Lulu (dir. Tom Gutteridge), Helen of Troy in The Greeks (dir. Melanie Beddie); Fluellen in Henry V (dir. Leith McPherson) and Tituba in The Crucible (dir. Adena Jacobs). Sarah has also featured in the webseries Words From Wilde (dir. Mary McGillivray) as Constance Lloyd, and VCA-produced web series The Waiting Game as Jess. In 2015 she was a creator in the devised show The Roar which was awarded The Script Writing Award by the University of Melbourne Theatre Board.

Magda Miranda

Magda is a performer and visual artist with background in dance, drama
and improvisation. Magda is Brazilian and works across media to realise live performance that responds to identity, location and belonging. Her latest work explored her bi-cultural identities through performance. She presented Fractured, a live durational installation at Big West Festival 2015. In 2016 she performed Pedaços, a solo work composed of memories and artefacts collected over a life, in the La Mama Exploration program. She is currently an associate director with Fusion, an inclusive theatre company in Dandenong.