I love storytelling.
I have been longing to do create more projects but whenever I sit down to write a script my ideas come to me visually, and if they are words, they come out in poetry or rhymes or silly jokes that are better suited for the Chronicles of Space Mama Piggy, the space piggy suffering from separation anxiety after blasting her many oh so many offspring into space (a story dear to my heart, that keeps getting put on the bottom of my priorities as life and its creative and survival distractions soldier on).
This year I am embracing that fact as simply my directorial quality. I am a visual artist, and I will approach storytelling as such. My voice as the person I am, a woman, an immigrant, a person who admires kindness, playfulness and joy above most other qualities, will not be the same as the stereotypical traits of masculine directors we so often see around us.
As a performer I often work without directors, through devising in creative ensembles where we swap authority by day and bring in lots of trustworthy outside eyes. But then there are certain stories that I really do want to see come to life, and as they are currently only within my head I have to slowly sketch them out through action with collaborators I admire who are game to go through that process of discovery and trust - sometimes without a conventional script.
And that’s just how I feel now, in the month of February 2020. Maybe this time next year my style will be very different. I know I direct very differently now than I did back in 2013 and 2014 with my theatre company Spindrift. I know that workshop leading through 2014-2017 with Spindrift was very helpful in shaping how to navigate performers through a specific process. And I am very excited to continue creating. Rather than creating a portfolio for this section of my work, I figured I’d therefore open up the process and turn this section into a blog instead. Allowing more insight into the process rather than simply showing the product.
With love,
Sólveig