Theatre makers from Voila! Europe about the festival

This week sees the return of the much-loved Voila! Europe festival to the Cockpit Theatre. With an eclectic international programme both onstage and online, we speak to festival co-director Amy Tasker alongside three of the companies involved to find out what audiences can expect from this year’s offering.

Voila! Europe Theatre Festival

Festival co-director Amy Clare Tasker

Amy, can you tell us a bit about the history of Voila! Europe?

This is the 9th year of the festival, which began as a French & English bilingual fringe festival produced by The Cockpit. In response to the Brexit referendum, the 2017 festival expanded to include all European languages, and expanded into more venues, too. We’ve had the pleasure to present performances at Rich Mix, the Actors Centre, Etcetera Theatre and Applecart arts in 2018 and 2019.

Then in 2020, we adapted the festival to an online format, while retaining the “liveness” of a theatre festival as much as possible – the welcoming and convivial atmosphere of Voila! Europe is very important to us. We hosted watch parties of pre-recorded shows with post-show discussions between the artists and audiences, and we presented live online performances streamed from artists’ homes in London, Italy, Portugal, New York, and even Colombia.

And what can audiences expect from this year’s festival?

Voila! Europe is a gateway to unique cross-cultural encounters, and a rare opportunity to experience the rich variety of styles, aesthetics, and ideas from across Europe, without leaving London. This year, we are delighted to be back on stage at The Cockpit, as well as online, so audiences can enjoy the festival at the theatre or from home – wherever home may be!

On stage, Ladder Art Company’s beautiful circus-mime show Awakening makes its UK debut, supported by the Liszt Institute – Hungarian Cultural Centre, London.

Three more shows in the festival are world premiere productions, brand new for Voila! Europe this year: Transit, Fear Eats Life, and Are You Done [ _SOLITUDE_ IS _BLISS_ PART 1A]. Read on to find out more about those shows, directly from the artists.

Online UK & London premieres include I Am by Kupalaucy Independent Theatre Group, formerly a national theatre of Belarus; RadioLove by Helsinki-based StudioTotal; Deserted Shores // Negative Photographs by GalataPerform in Istanbul; Going Home by Scallabouche Theatre Company, performing live from Budapest, and You in My House by the National Theatre in Prague, supported by the Czech Centre London as part of their 25th Made in Prague Festival.

Amidst all this newness, we’re delighted to welcome back Voila! Europe veterans Created a Monster, with their ‘funny and haunting’ satire Unforgettable Girl. In a similar physical theatre style, OfTheJackel presents Withered Optimism, a tender-comic ode to the tyranny of work. And finally the FBI: French British Improvisation returns to the festival with their improvised Murder Mystery.

The festival begins on Monday with a European takeover of The Cockpit’s regular scratch night, Theatre in the Pound. Join us for three works in progress followed by an opening night celebration in the bar.

I’m so proud of our small team at The Cockpit, and of all the festival artists who have weathered the challenges of the last two years. We can’t wait to throw open the doors again and welcome audiences to the festival this week!

TRANSIT

Tatenda Matsvai

Can you tell us a bit about your show and the inspiration behind it?

TRANSIT navigates the uncertainty of assimilation and queerness in the UK in a sensorial journey told through live music, dance, and poetry. We follow the story of Zuva and Dora, told by our nomadic bards, in a joyful celebration of culture and resistance.

We first had the inspiration for this show when we were in our last year at Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance. We were discussing home, and feelings of belonging and how we made these spaces for ourselves or sought them out on arriving in london.

There was a sense post-Brexit that we were entering into a period of instability as non-citizens; it felt as though we could be displaced quite easily, with the Windrush scandal and new obstacles being placed by the Home Secretary, there was a general unease around what our futures in the UK would be.

Within the instability and the sharing of our fears we found a great love for how we do come together, how we foster communities and families away from our ‘homelands’ and make-shift new homes through the sharing of our stories. We wanted to play with our respective traditions, while queering those traditions, so the show fuses folk music from Hungary and Zimbabwe with storytelling and mythology that reflects the experiences of Queer LGBTQIA people from our diasporas, which were stories we never got to see.

And what are you most excited about for performing at this year’s festival?

We are excited to be debuting work at an international festival with European artists. We love cultural exchange, and continue to seek opportunities to connect with the European Theatre Arts community. As recent graduates from the ETA course at Rose Bruford, both Brexit and Covid kyboshed many of the opportunities for cultural exchange that we had planned. This is a big leap forward into the European theatre world, after a time of doubt and stagnation, that will no doubt propel us into the start of our professional careers.

FEAR EATS LIFE

Timna Krenn

Can you tell us a bit about your show and the inspiration behind it?

Our debut performance Fear Eats Life looks at fear, how it affects us and how we deal with it. We combine comedy, music and spoken word with some snippets performed in French, German and Japanese.

In our show you can actually meet Fear in person, performed by Jeremy Chevillotte, a non-binary actor. It was extremely interesting to explore the feeling of fear, in parallel with the human rights campaign for the LGBTQI+ community. Our inspiration comes from the need to break a taboo.

We all faced new fears during the pandemic. As artists we could no longer pursue our activities in person, as immigrants we were separated from our families for a long time and as humans we were fundamentally faced with new challenges. But who really speaks about their fears?

We want to open a discussion about fear and hope to engage the audience in what it means to feel fear, why some of us are affected by it more than others, and what we can do to reclaim our lives from its hungry jaws. This piece asks if there are any benefits to feeling fear in the modern day and how do we live, if fear is breathing down our necks?

And what are you most excited about for performing at this year’s festival?

As an international collective, we are extremely excited about being able to perform in London after Brexit. A lot of Europeans left the capital city because the UK left the European Union, and European artists are now facing the challenges of visa applications. But many Europeans remained in the UK and we are delighted to give them a face on stage. Voila! Europe gives us the opportunity to show that multicultural exchange is an enrichment and that cross-border collaborations are still possible.

ARE YOU DONE [ _SOLITUDE_ IS _BLISS_ PART 1A]

Francasixiə

Can you tell us a bit about your show and the inspiration behind it?

As an artist and PhD student, I work with posthuman voices, in the form of synthetic voices. My research studies what humans could get from, and how humans relate to, those voices, and what those voices could represent in performance. To respond to the obnoxious number of algorithmic inputs that overwhelmed my first lockdown, I decided to devise a project called ‘Are you done? [Solitude is Bliss’].

This show is a part of my embodied and constant exploration of the struggle of solitude, through conscious comedy and deliberately confusing practices of alienation. I started working on these concepts in 2020, when I spent the majority of my time in complete solitude.

In lockdown, the only company I had was from either projected voices and images of my family, friends, and colleagues, or, more intrusively and frequently, from algorithms.

I developed a co-dependency with my digital companions, such as Amazon Alexa or my phone, that drove me to re-imagine the human-machine relationship. Mental health struggles have undoubtedly been the ‘other’ virus of the pandemic, and this show is part of the process to re-imagine how technology can help us navigate solitude.

And what are you most excited about for performing at this year’s festival?

The pandemic restrictions, both on our lives and in live events, pushed me as an artist to explore these new mediums forcing us to acquire new tools and skills. I’m excited to see artists pioneering innovative strategies for online platforms, while retaining the excitement of a real LIVE performance. Voila! Europe gave me and my team the opportunity to explore such new mediums and challenges in a safe and supporting environment.

The show is divided into different tasks throughout the whole week of the festival, and the hybrid format of Voila! Europe is extremely helpful for this particular performance. In addition, the festival is a wonderful opportunity to be able to share a space with other artists from all over the world and have the chance to know them, to build a community of workers together.

Voila! Europe 2021 runs onstage and online from 15^th – 21^stNovember. For more information, please visit the Cockpit’s website.