Collab Company

agon
[noun]
the conflict which exists to drive and define the arcs of dramatic characters as with the protagonist, antagonist and deuteragonist; from the Greek 'agon' (struggle)

SISYPHEAN
You know the story, right?

Some twaza does something stupid that upsets the worst of The Olympians. So Zeus curses him to an eternity pushing a boulder up a mountain, only to get to the top and watch it roll back down, where he must start again and again, forever!

My name isn't Sisyphus and I don’t think I've ever done anything to warrant Zeus’ wrath, but my path has never felt more Sisyphean to me than it does right now.

For months I have contemplated how best to post what I feel compelled to without ruffling too many feathers. Why? Because I have experienced those in both industries who cannot bear to have their feathers ruffled by anyone they deem unworthy; anyone who remains unenthralled by their grandeur or grandstanding; anyone who triggers the shadow in them.

Thus, enter Sisyphus, stage right.
An analogy.

The mountain is a mindset. It operates in classrooms and boardrooms in equal measure. It tells students the arts are not academic despite evidence to the contrary. It arrives in educational frameworks that have not been interrogated in years. It sits in institutions where funding is removed until someone suggests something for musical, visual and multidisciplinary art instead of performance. It closes doors for creatives based on whether they trained in a few specific postcodes in the UK or one specific emirate in the UAE.

The boulder is a decision. It is fighting against gravity until you inevitably lose your footing and are crushed by the weight of a decision made for you (or about you) by those you may even expect it from, but often from those you do not. It is pushing back on such decisions for a decade whether making or teaching theatre in the UAE. It is the incessant write, direct, design, produce, be bolstered, be let down, figure it out, tour, teach, mentor, disrupt, adapt, invoke, care, challenge, try, and try again.

Is it any wonder why my life feels so Sisyphean?

But that is an example of how to focus on the wrong question! Why? Because it centres the self instead of the issue. Ahem!

The right question is...

Who gains what from Sisyphus being crushed under the weight of a boulder and exhausted by the height of a mountain?

LUCY
My first lead role (Lucy Pevensie)
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2001)

DISRUPT
I worked really, really hard on a talk for a while ago and was devastated to have fallen ill on the day of filming. The talk was built upon specific features of my presentation and was informed by some of the ideas discussed by my insightful panelists (Vee, Kaia, Helena and Lauren) thereafter ✨️

One day, at school, while I was musing on my speech format, one of my older students asked me outright:

"What is like to run your own theatre company here, Miss?"

"Umm..."

I was caught by a battle between two ideals.

One, I never lie to my students. Ever. I soften the truth with compassion or, sometimes, a more age appropriate framing. But I will not lie to them.

Two, my role as an educator of the arts is to inspire the next generation to see value and viability in the industry I teach them about every day.

"Umm..."

I took a beat, then a breath, and said:

"Its not that good right now, if I am being honest. It's been a journey of ups and downs over the past few years but, truthfully, it has felt like a lot more downs than ups in quite a few spaces."

They all stared at me.

Then one of them piped up with something that piqued my interest.

"Well, it makes sense that it's so difficult, Miss, because you're doing something that is going against a lot of the things we've been talking about in class."

We had been chatting about hustle culture, about the theatrical community in the UAE feeling somehow manosphere-adjacent at times, about outlandish copyright infringements, about toddler tantrums that people call politics, about a money over morals mindset, about those within this community who are so often sidelined or exploited or tokenised to push a narrative, about how the lack of access to funding and scholarships means that the grey area of theatre will always be found between amateur and import, between event and art.

It was in that moment, as my students sat staring, that the words from my company ethos entered my mind.

Disrupt.
Disrupter.
Disrupting.

And there it was...

The cause of my Sisyphean suffering.
The symptom of my rebellious worldview.

And maybe...
Just maybe...

The solution to the problem?