Brighton Festival: The moments that shape us are brought to the stage

It comes to this year’s Brighton Festival with a performance in the Brighton Dome Concert Hall on Wednesday, May 25 at 7pm.

On a stage set with a trapeze, circus rope and set of drums, four performers start to tell stories from their lives, from their childhoods and from the last 24 months. They talk about uncertainty, about times of big decisions and about getting through things together. The character of Circus interrupts them: Graziella has fallen on hard times. Her poetry weaves through the show, becoming part of the storytelling. Human features live original music, soulful drumming, rope and trapeze performance. Dance and film footage (with integrated BSL interpretation and captioning) is drawn from the performers’ actual lives.

The live and recorded sounds are played through silent disco headphones, creating an intimate relationship between performers and audience, promises Claire Hodgson, founder and chief executive of Diverse City.

“The show was created during the third lockdown. We had a period of 18 months where we couldn't work together and so we began to record audio of the stories about our lives. There are four performers who are live and one that appears on a large cinema screen as if he were live. They recorded answers to a series of questions that then became the show and each audience member is sitting there listening on a pair of headphones because in the headphones the sound is directional.

“The stories are talking about the difficulties of living with uncertainty as a human and how our experience of uncertainty is actually double edged. Uncertainty is something where we feel fearful and anxious and it is hard for us to live through a sustained period of uncertainty but uncertainty is also the place where we fall in love, where we have children, where we take on adventures, where we take on challenges and so on.

“The stories in the show are very varied and they are also true. There about the performers that you see on stage. There are experiences that are life-changing like falling in love or deciding to have a child or to have an operation, but there are also the smaller things like the joy in cake and the joy in biscuits.

“It's really significant that the half the cast are disabled artists and half the cast are women. Our company is inclusive. Disabled people in particular in our society have to think about challenges all the time and have to remove the boundaries that are placed in their way. Disabled people and disabled collaborators that I have worked with are very good at seeing the wider picture and very good at being problem solvers. We toured with the show last autumn. We premiered it in Southampton at MAST and then we did a short tour. Audiences really loved it and wanted to talk to us about it all afterwards