Dramatising the refugee experience in Dido's Bar
Artistic director and director of Dido’s Bar, Josephine Burton, shares her thoughts on how we’re keeping current political issues in mind while developing this production.
Buried under the coverage of our late monarch's life and death this weekend, I read that our new home secretary is considering pursuing the policy of pushing back the boats of migrants headed desperately to our shores. The news landed uncomfortably with me, at the end of an intense rehearsal week for Dido's Bar, a show I'm directing which tells the epic tale of Aeneas, a refugee from Troy, who travelled across the Med seeking sanctuary in Europe. This tale has woven through the personal experiences of the show's composer @marouf_majidi and many other stories of refugees whom our playwright @hattienaylor and I have had the privilege to learn through our research.
This week I worked with fight coordinator @natibogd and our movement director @aysetashkiranmovementdirector on the physical dramaturgy. We brought violence into the production thanks to Natalia's calculated moves, developing the raw menace of our anti hero Turnus, the local boy enraged by the arrival of Aeneas who threatens all of his life plans. And with Ayse, I looked at dramatising Hattie and Marouf's extraordinary double act of Panic Boats, a duet by Dido and Aeneas evoking their shared experience of traversing the Med, a journey which carried such a promise of sanctuary and deep peril. The song is beautiful and epic in scale. Ever since I first heard it, I've been mulling over how much physical narrative to draw into the song.
This week I reached a decision that I had a responsibility not to. Hattie's words and Marouf's music speak for themselves. It is not my place to dramatise or sensationalise these stories. I couldn't touch the sheer horror and tragedy of those journeys and of the experience of deportation which our show also touches on.
No doubt the threat of Rwandan deportations will return to our news as soon as the news cycle moves on from the Royal Family. The life threatening decisions and risks that these migrants take are still so real, 2000 years on from Virgil’s original tale. It is impossible not to see, read and feel them in our show. It is sufficient and respectful to simply hold them in our text and let them be heard.
Josephine Burton
