Welcome to The Letters Project
The Letters Project is an ongoing collaboration between co-directors Nina Bowers, Yasmin Hafesji, Ellen McDougall, Hannah Ringham and Moi Tran.
We started working together in March 2020.
Since then, we’ve made a few different iterations of the project, with 20 additional freelance artists, and partners including Age UK Kensington and Chelsea and SISMO International Festival.
This page is a record of the process, from when we started, to where we are now, and some thoughts for the future.
We hope you enjoy reading it.
Letters, Summer 2021
In Summer 2021, we made a recording of letters written between two strangers – Elizabeth Chan and Irfan Shamji. We collaborated with sound designer Rebekah Elero, and web designer and assistant designer Erin C. Guan.
It’s an offer. To be still for a moment. To reach out to a stranger.
You can listen for free here
(a written transcript is also available on this page)
A LETTER FROM THE CO-DIRECTING TEAM, SUMMER 21:
Last year we were inside a lot. We started this project of letter writing to try something new. To connect people who hadn’t met before. To do something to be together when we couldn’t be in the theatre.
The lockdown and restrictions of 2020 forced us into new ways of working and collaborating. We had to be in a space of uncertainty. And we really didn’t know what we were doing.
Having grown with this project for over a year, we now know that The Letters Project is about looking at the relationship between a letter and live theatre, creating spaces to connect more intimately, meeting people you don’t know, connecting to the now in the context of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, finding new ways of sharing and collaborating, sending thoughts, ideas and poems into the future.
It’s about not rushing, offering something small, quiet, and slow. It’s about being still, making attempts, and for us, about embracing longer timelines for making stuff.
This year, in 2021, we have moved from being inside to outside. We still can’t physically be in the Gate Theatre, but we wanted to find ways to bring the intimacy of what we discovered with the letters project last year out into the world in this time of flux.
We wanted this new version of the project to be an opportunity to connect on your terms. An invitation to take some time to pause, and listen, from wherever you are.
The letters Elizbeth Chan and Irfan Shamji have written to each other are gifts. By sharing their insights, reflections, experiences and poems in our local community and online, we’re opening a window to reflect on the year we’ve been through, and the time we’re living in now.
– Nina Bowers
THE LETTERS PROJECT X AGE UK KENSINGTON AND CHELSEA
In January 2021, we began a new iteration of The Letters Project in a partnership with Age UK Kensington and Chelsea. We paired people from Age UK with our Young Associates to write letters to one another – connecting them with each other on paper through the lockdown and as the UK opened up into the summer of 2021.
They shared stories of their pasts, their travels, and what was keeping them going through this time. In August, we met one another in person for the first time. Some of the pairs are continuing to write to each other.
Check out the photos below of our Gate Young Associates meeting their letter writing partners from Age UK Kensington and Chelsea.
Photo Credit: Floro Azqueta, 2021
I felt, they will accept you, who you are, on paper
She as a young person is making me wiser
there is something liberating about writing to someone you don't know
when I got the letter, I knew I existed, I felt normal
Backstory
The Letters Project began in March 2020, from an idea by Nina Bowers that built on the work we had done together, with others, when we made Dear Elizabeth in 2019.
The first iteration was a live zoom show, which we made with 18 additional guest performers, and the Gate Team including Ed Borgnis (technical support), Hannah Dunne (this website!) and Jenny Pearce (producer).
The Team
Moi Tran is an Artist/Performance maker/Researcher and Designer, her practice explores the intersections between Contemporary Art and Live Performance. Tran’s work includes as set & costume designer for Theatre, Film, Dance and Opera. She is founder of East Asian Ticket Club, an engagement platform for the BESEA community.
Recent Theatre include: Chiaroscuro(Bush);White Pearl(Royal Court);Dear Elizabeth(Gate); Summer Rolls (Park); Under the Umbrella (Belgrade/Tara Arts);Deluge (Hampstead).
Recent Art Performance include: The Bolero Effect – (VCCA Vietnam ,Hanoi);The Circuit- A Movement Scenario (Prague Quadrennial/OvalSpace/SPILL Festival);Three Women and a Duck (Vietnam, Laos, Thailand);The Other day you sat too far away from me( Henry Moore Courtyard);SLEEP( Live Art Development Agency, Royal Court).
Recent Awards/Commissions include: ArtHouse Artist in Residence;SPILL Festival; Curator Encounter Bow Chisenhale Dance; British Council Vietnam 2019;Arts and Culture Fellowship SEA 2019; OV12 Artist 2018.
Letters 2020
On making the show –
Here’s a blog we wrote about the rehearsal process, and what it meant to us, as 5 co-directors:
Directors often talk about the idea of collaboration when making work because it is an attractive, welcoming, and somewhat utopian opening gambit to a rehearsal process. But the truth is, working collaboratively is difficult. Largely because the traditional structures within which we make work don’t support it or because as artists we are unwilling to relinquish control. Working on Letters, with a team of four other co-directors, only confirmed how difficult collaboration is. At each step in the process, we were having to respond to the kaleidoscopic vision of five – radically different – brains working together. It forced me to look at things from different angles, through different lenses and at times with an entirely different language. It also forced me to abandon my ego – the trademark of a baby theatre director with no real clue what they’re doing but an aggressive commitment to appearing in control.
Making work in this way – with no singular voice in ‘control’ – was a messy, and sometimes chaotic process. It was a way of working that didn’t feel neat or ordered, but somehow real and alive. There was a sense of growth that permeated throughout – with all the natural growing pains that come with it. But it was this complex multiplicity that was central to the making of Letters – something which was being made by five artists, and remade by each performer, and then remade again in the mind of each audience member.
– Yasmin Hafesji
Creating Letters was a whole new process of making theatre. Is it even theatre? We worked as 5 co-directors once a week on Zoom, over a 6-month period- since the beginning of lockdown, making this show. For me, it is something to do with theatre. Something to do with liveness, being playful, sharing stories, expressing and articulating joys and difficulties. The confusion of what we are living in exists somewhere in this show too- right now it’s a new sort of world, we don’t know what is going to happen- with theatre, with the pandemic, with current political situations and there is a presence of this reality in the letters written by theatre artists who took part. We also tried to connect with and play with this confusion/ unknowingness a bit in creating the show. Some of the performers who took part and the audience who watched it found some feeling of freedom in it- that is something for me- considering we are living in a world where rules and restrictions are more prevalent now.
A surprising joy has been the growing wealth of wonderful letters and each time a letter is opened up, the particular discoveries made between two people and the audience. Having seen all the performances of Letters, the whole experience starts to become something of a community event of one big show over days, from an incredible group of writers, actors and performers offering multi- facets of expression, vision and humour in this unfolding unusual time. I am grateful for having watched and listened and for the creative time making this with my brilliant co- directors and collaborators.
– Hannah Ringham
Over the last few months, talk has been labour for many and listening for few. We spoke of the need for change in the way our industry works, change to the systemic structure that continues to perpetuate the cycle of exclusion and prejudice. We continue to speak of this, but the question is will we see real change and if we eventually do, who will it be for?
With every new project, I battle against the hierarchical nature of the Arts and the archaic constructs that keep my voice unheard and my ideas unfulfilled. Where is the truly democratic space for collaboration, in an industry entrenched in an all consuming ego that finds its roots in the history of white superiority?
For me, Letters was an experiment to address some of these internalised wounds and externalised weapons, a laboratory that held a group of people together for 6 months, an experiment in how to think about the past, the present and the future. It is a strange thing to be in the midst of creating something whilst simultaneously feeling the need to destroy it. To RECREATE, RECONCEIVE, REBUILD, RETHINK the intrinsic process of making and experiencing performance.
I am grateful to my co-directors, their commitment, heartfelt passion, humanness and for holding our space as one…….. and to the wonderful performers who trusted us enough to be part of this experience.
The experiment continues. The result will be knowledge for us.
– Moi Tran
We started with a conversation about isolation, loneliness, our need to reach each other at a moment when we couldn’t.
We reflected on the cognitive dissonance of zoom calls: feeling connected and together, and then the strangeness, heightened at the end of a call, in discovering you are alone – and have been all along.
We started writing each other letters. We shared the most mundane moments – I’m sitting on my step with a cup of tea – but somehow they brought us closer than staring at
the five squares of our faces on a zoom screen. It also encouraged us to share things we might never say out loud – or maybe had never found the courage to.
Something that sits at the heart of the theatre we make at the Gate is the feeling of being in a small intimate space with a group of other people. Some of them are performing, some are watching. You can see every single other person in the space. Live theatre is, for me, a place for us to see one another, to share a space, a story, an experience – and in that way, maybe it can be a place we can be more caring, careful, with each other.
So a focus for this project for me was to try to make something that enabled that seeing, that caring, to happen in a digital space stripped of the nuance of human interaction.
We tried to incorporate the mess and spontaneity inherent in live performance – having unrehearsed performers taking a leap of faith, the letters themselves – tearing open an envelope, struggling to read one another’s handwriting, being surprised at the coincidences, the differences, the discoveries of each other.
Perhaps this experiment enables us to meet each other in a different (deeper?) way than we might in person. Nina wrote in one of her first emails about this project being a search for silver linings amidst the stress and difficulty of this time – I hope this is one of them.
– Ellen McDougall
Letters,
over the time we spent making it always felt like an experiment in connection. Not a massive world changing technology or statement but like experimenting with a recipe. A bit more of this, a bit less of that- Little nudges this way and that toward a place where we could be together differently. The time it took to make (six months) and the slowness and strangeness of the time meant that the show has had a rare organic space to grow. It’s a very different kind of show: the most part of the content (the letter and the connection between the performers) is the least controlled element, it’s a show with 5 directors but no traditional rehearsals and we are asking actors to be themselves instead of characters. It sits in the inbetweens: not quite a zoom meeting, not quite casual, not quite digital, not quite analogue, not quite theatre. I think this fluidity in the form allows it to be a kind of reclamation of uncertainty. For me the show is an opportunity to reflect on this time as it unfolds but also simply to be together
NOW.
– Nina Bowers
Letters Playlist
Turn up the volume and listen to the music that inspired The Letters Project.
Dearly beloved, we have gathered here today, To get through this thing called life... – Prince
The Letters Themselves
We asked the performers to introduce themselves to each other. Here are some of the introductions…
Hi. Nice to meet you. I’m excited about doing this with you.
(Annie Siddons to Joey Akubeze)
My full name is Elizabeth Wai (pronounced Way) See (pronounced how you think it is) Chan.
A half English, half Cantonese name.
My father chose my Cantonese name.
It means ‘great poem’.
(Elizabeth Chan to Irfan Shamji)
My name is Nina May Bowers. Nina after Nina Simone and because my gran wouldn’t name me Florence. This was because I had a great Aunt Florence who was very far and blonde and me being a brown brunette she felt the name was inappropriate. I don’t care though because I’m glad I’m called Nina and not Florence. My middle name is May for my grandmother who’s name was Olive May (she was also a brunette, for the record). Bowers is my Dad’s last name presumably the last name of the slave owner who owned my ancestors. My dad actually shares his name (both first and last) with the former grand wizard of the KKK. Which has always made him laugh. He laughs because he imagines prospective employers looking him up on the internet and then being surprised when a black man turns up for the interview. I don’t think that entirely holds together but he finds it amusing. Dad humour I guess. I suppose that’s actually quite a lot of stuff going on in my name! Enough to fill a page and a bit.
(Nina Bowers to Hannah Ringham)
Hello!
This is Tim Crouch.
On my passport: Timothy James Crouch.
What were my parents thinking? It was the Sixties. Nominative determinism would decree that I would never be a boxer with a name like that, or a gangster, or an oil rigger, a pirate, a trawler-man, a fire-breather, a wrangler, a wide boy, a wild man. So, I’m a theatre maker.
(Tim Crouch to Nadia Albina)
My name is Irfan Shamji (I pronounce it ‘ear’-‘fan’). It’s kind of an anglicised way of saying my name. The original (Indian) pronunciation sounds something more like the rhotic ‘iR’ in irrational and ‘fan’ sounds more like ‘khan’. Actually, like the late actor Irrfan Khan. I’ve spent most of my life saying my name the anglicised way, I guess as a way to fit in at school? In society? I recently tried to get people to pronounce it the Indian way as a way of, like, reclaiming my name or identity or something and yeah that was an interesting little experiment. Some people took to it, mainly my British Asian friends, for some it was a little cumbersome. I mean it was a little cumbersome for me too sometimes because it’s not how I’m used to saying it either. One thing I really like about my name is that it lends itself really nicely to different accents. I like the difference between how a Northerner might say my name, compared to like how someone from Ireland or Scotland might say it or a Jamaican. Is the actor in you now attempting to say my name in these accents?…There are subtle differences even in how my parents pronounce my name. My mum is half Zambian half Greek and my Dad is Half Indian half Congolese. What an absolute stew of a person that makes me, right? What an absolute boeuf bourguignon. Mixed Other is usually the box I tick on forms…
(Irfan Shamji to Elizabeth Chan)
…Liz Chan shared what it might mean to introduce yourself to another person on paper in her letter to Irfan Shamji, who she’d never met…
I was reading an interview the other day with the poet Eileen Myles – they said they started to exist when they started to write. They started to exist on the page. It reminded me of something another poet, Ocean Vuong, said about language making you visible. And when you’re visible, he said, people can care about you.
(Elizabeth Chan to Irfan Shamji)
…The project began for us from a conversation about loneliness, isolation, our need to reach each other…
I’m looking at a very big and very beautiful tree outside the window here. It has become quite an important part of my day to look at it on and off.
When I look at it, I am thinking about the particular light green of the leaves that appear yellow when the light hits them full on.
I’m am thinking how big and strong it looks and I am wondering how many years it’s been in my neighbours garden. I’m noticing the leaves moving individually and together.
I’m not thinking about how much everything has changed and how uncertain so much feels.
(Helena Lymbery to Isabel Adomakoh Young)
…Perhaps letters enable us to say things we might not in person – things we might not think are important enough to spend time talking about, or might not be brave enough to say out loud…
Paper is a soft blanket to wrap truth in.
(Annie Siddons to Joey Akubeze).
There’s something I could say that I couldn’t say on any other day – it’s exactly five years ago today that one of the dearest friends I’ve ever had (or am ever likely to have) died. Her name was Rae Pinx.
(Chris Thorpe to Kayla Miekle)
…This leap of faith we were asking of our performers brought them together. Tim Crouch described his experience of performing in Dear Elizabeth in his letter to Nadia Albina like this…
It felt a bit like falling in love. If only all first-time meetings could be like that –the adrenaline of performance, the prospect of something new and un-repeatable. Short, sweet, intense, good-willed, vulnerable – and a hundred quid. I’m a hopeful man.
(Tim Crouch to Nadia Albina)
…The performers were asked to choose a poem to send each other at the end of their letter. The range of choices are listed in full below, but here are some of their thoughts on this…
So. So. The poem I have chosen to share with you is written by a woman called Hannah Drake. She is a black queer artist from Louisville, Kentucky, where Breonna Taylor and David McAke were killed by police. It is also where my wonderful older sister lives. It’s a beautiful poem. I hope you enjoy it. Brace yourself…
(Joey Akubeze to Annie Siddons, on Dying Declarations by Hannah Drake).
I chose this poem because it’s really evocative work about self-love and the act of knowing oneself which I think is very beautiful and important.
(Kwame Owusu to Frankie Henry, on Love after Love by Derek Walcott)
…The poem Isabel Adomakoh Young shared with Helena Lymbery, as well as the closing lines of her letter, sum up some of the hopes for this experiment in not-knowing and in trying to reach each other…