A project with ExploreTheArch Theatre Company, exploring the lai’s of 12th Century adventure writer Marie De France and her forgotten female workforce. Dame Marie pioneered an innovative writing style. Female illustrators were her contemporaries, working to illuminate manuscripts with exquisite margins.
Marie In The Margins, explores the relationship between three contemporary women working in the creative industries and the ground-breaking medieval female author. A video installation featuring artist Yasmin Aishah, graphic designer Erica Smith and writer Hannah Collisson, with music composition from Ruby Colley.
Each of the three women explore a selection of Dame Marie’s lai stories and her characters, exploring their personal relationships with the women she writes about, and exploring their present counterparts and practices.
Alongside this video installation, performers and partners delivered a series of educational creative workshops for children, hosted at Hastings Museum and English Heritage Trust: 1066 Abbey and Battlefield, Workshop facilitators worked with children to explore their own contemporary practices in contrast with our medieval predecessors. Children imagined the space as an abbey where they experienced scribing, illustration, writing, puppetry and music all whilst learning important our forgotten female workforce truly was.
Director: Gail Borrow
Cinematographer: Rod Morris
Composer: Ruby Colley
Performers: Yasmin Aishah, Erica Smith and Hannah Collisson
ExploreTheArch performers Yasmin Aishah and Hannah Collisson explored their multiple identities via the introspection that pervaded their childhoods. Both artists created personal and magical garden spaces in which to reflect quietly on the known and unknown of relatives, residences and ritual from their mixed race heritage.
Iraq, Ghana, Belize, New Zealand, the UK, Distance and boundaries merged, Poetic worlds emerged.
Inspired by the protagonist of Rumer Godden's 1972 Whitbread Prize winning novel, The Diddakoi, Kizzy Lovell: a child who loves to live in the garden.
Throughout 'Earthed' each performer explores their heritage and ancestry. With the combined magic of storytelling and domestic theatre, audiences are taken on a global journey through the lens of each actors' childhood memories and imagined spaces. Allowing introspective into the lives of two separate women of mixed descent and the worlds they have created, exploring their significant characters and the places they have travelled to and where they may go next.
Director: Gail Borrow
Stage Engineer: Paul Beadle
Performers: Yasmin Aishah and Hannah Collisson
A 12th Century writer, a 21st Century Audience.
From director Gail Borrow, Spirited was sprung from Marie de France’s vivid and surreal adventures written a hundred years after the Norman invasion of 1066. A kaleidoscope of unconventional heroes present themselves— a youth uninterested in love, a woman who says something she regrets and a steady partner who is a closet werewolf three days a week – all pushing boundaries to honour their unconventional selves, sometimes successfully, sometimes not.
Three performers Yasmin Aishah, Erica Smith and Alice Beadle perform a short 'playlet' of a chosen Dame Marie's Lai stories. All three ‘playlets’ begin with a celebration of the magic of ‘marginalia’ – the beautiful and fantastic creations found in the margins of medieval manuscripts. Margins personal to each performers creative practice were created to reinforce and strengthen the bonds between the characters within the stories and their modern day descendants.
The contemporary view of medieval book production tends to be of monks bowed assiduously over manuscripts, but there is a forgotten history of women at work: research confirms female scribes signed their work – and much unsigned work could have been created by women. Recent finding of lapis lazuli, the precious, ultramarine pigment, in a woman’s teeth buried at a German monastery, strengthens the case for a female workforce.
Director: Gail Borrow
Puppet Engineer: Paul Beadle
Composer: Alice Beadle
Performers: Erica Smith, Yasmin Aishah. Alice Beadle.
As part of 'ATownExploresABook2021' based on an exploration of Edward Lear's 'The Owl and The Pussycat' Yasmin Aishah and Peter Quinnell worked with local children of St. Leonards to create a series of nonsense collages. Inspired by Lear's well established nonsensical humour in his writings, children from all over the local community were invited to produce their own nonsense poems with provided resources. Artists invited them to use this nonsense format to create collage pieces to compliment the poems.
With editing from both Aishah and Quinnell, collages were printed and hung in the local community, celebrating the recognition of Lear's works and nonsensical creativity among both the younger and older communities.
ATownExploresABook is an annual festival organised by lead director of ExploreTheArch Ltd. Gail Borrow. The festival is a collaboration between a variety of local small businesses and vendors that celebrate a selected piece of children's literature each year. The festival includes the delivery of multiple workshops hosted by local creatives, neighbourhood art trails, performances and more!
Find out more: http://atownexploresabook.com/
