A is for Atlas Forty-Five Downstairs, 2013 Directed by Tamara Searle Assistant Director and Sound Helen Rekkor Ensemble: Leone White, Brook Sykes, Kate Parkins, Steve Brown, Shannon Quinn
Devised over an epic 18 months, VOYAGE was a scrutinisation of the way we record and digest history, via the staging of the 1883 shipboard diary of Thomas Pender.
"Like memory, a version of history is created newly in each retelling. However much the historian, or in our case the performance maker, attempts to stay close to the facts, she is always interpreting it with her own lens. The ensemble cast, in addition to enacting the world of Pender’s diary, stage live the performer’s struggle with the instability of history. Events and characters are multiplied and overwritten with alternatives: ‘it didn’t happen like that, it was like this’. Censures, erasures, corrections and refinements are staged to ‘get it right’, to get the ‘actual and properly truthful’ version of history told. Does it exist?"