We are here!

Welcome to One and Three Quarters blog. I’m Vicki and a member of the company. I’m delighted to be writing our first blog post.

We have been working for the past three months in finding our voice as a company. We came together as four women, four artists with different skills and backgrounds. But united, by exploring the world of disability and everyday ableism.

We are now devising o

Three actors in rehearsal explore a script. Susie is using her phone to adapt the script to large print for rehearsal. The character on the left is comforting the middle character whilst the other looks annoyed.

Our first performance piece, Conversations With a Cripple. The work produced in our rehearsals comes from real-life stories that we have experienced as disabled folk. Our founder and writer, Susie Eder, is taking these experiences and building the script that will be our first show. The show will take our everyday stories and encounters (and some of the more extraordinary ones) and retell them to the audience using humour and debate. The audience will ultimately be faced with the decision of what is right or wrong when confronting ableism.

My background is as a theatre director, storyteller and deviser. My role in the company is to work closely with Susie and the cast to create rehearsals that provide us with material to work with. My strengths lie in drawing out stories and experiences from individuals. I champion the telling of everyday stories to learn and grow as people. We then take this material away to become the script. My responsibility is to think about how this will be staged and communicated. I play using techniques to arrange and tell the stories both visually and orally. Working with a scriptwriter is both new and challenging for me. I believe that it refines the devising process and combines to create more in-depth performance.

This week we developed some of the simple situations we have found ourselves in. These particular ones are performed as monologues by the central character. They are accompanied on stage by their inner dialogue. Two characters present the inner conversations/ conflicts of interest; the devil and the angel. This gives the audience a chance to see discussions that happen internally when faced with ableism. Their battle to ‘do the right thing’ often overwhelms the dialogue so that the original voice becomes drowned.

In the process so far I have loved seeing our understanding of each other’s disabilities grow. Having our own opinions change has been fundamental in our rehearsals so far. This is something we want to give to our audiences when we present our final performance.