Ad Infinitum present their new non-verbal solo show Last Rites at MimeLondon (24-27 Jan, Shoreditch Town Hall) and Manipulate Festival (3-4 Feb, Edinburgh).
This original production is a collaborative creation by renowned Deaf theatre maker Ramesh Meyyappan and George Mann, co-Artistic Director of Ad Infinitum.
I asked George and Ramesh to tell me a bit more about Last Rites and their creative process.
Grief means many things to many people. How does Last Rites deal with what is an emotive and personal subject for so many?
George: Last Rites deals with this emotive and personal subject by telling the story of a man who’s just lost his father, and decides to perform his own kind of ritual in order to process the death and say his own goodbye.
As he does this, he gets lost in memories of his relationship with his father, while also thinking about and dealing with his younger son. So all of this weaves together memory, the present day, emotions, grief, all in one go, to create quite an emotional journey.
Ramesh: It looks specifically at the loss of a parent – perhaps as most of us outlive our parents then hopefully there is that connection.
However, grief and loss is a hugely personal experience that affects us all quite differently and uniquely, so we are not suggesting that this is how grief is, this is what it looks like but rather this is something the audience may have experienced in their own very personal way.
George: We’re letting the audience into the mind, memories and emotions of the character so that they can experience it too; that’s how we’re dealing with it.
We do that visually so there’s no spoken word but there is BSL, and creative captioning, again to try and explore how we can open the world of this character Arjun emotionally.
That’s a really important part of this piece so that people can connect to the themes of death and parenthood, love, and loss.
This is a close collaboration between both of you and covers just 24 hours of loss and ritual. Was the process of working together easy for you?
Ramesh: It’s true, this is a close collaboration between George and myself – this is the first time working with him. I love his openness, allowing me to be free with ideas.
George: I’ve absolutely loved working with Rams. He’s a really special guy, extremely talented, so, so clever and imaginative and full of ideas. It’s been a joy to devise this show with him and co-create it in the room together.
Ramesh: The process of working together is easy to be honest, however the process of developing Last Rites has been very challenging for both of us – finding the narrative, as well as trying to share our understanding about loss and ritual – while of course trying to make that work onstage, has been quite a challenge.
Also, we are working out how we could build on each other’s individual skills while finding the visual language that would best support Last Rites.
George: Of course, it’s been challenging at times because we’ve looked back at our own experiences; we share so much in common, losing our dads, and the way we lost our dads, having children – so much that connected us, and that’s why we made this piece.
But then there have also been things in our experience that are really different, and that’s been amazing too because we’ve learned so much about each other and that’s really informed the kind of story that we want to tell.
So, it’s been a really beautiful process, really profound. I really hope that that comes across and is communicated through the fictional story that we’ve ended up creating for our audience.
Why is it important to use mime, projection, and sound to tell this story? What do you hope audiences might take away from it?
George: I would flip the first part of this question on its head and say that every time we tell the story, we look for the best way to tell it.
We explore its themes, the most powerful way to tell the story, and then start to pull together a style that really feels like it suits the play and the piece that we’re bringing to life. In this case, we knew we wanted it to be non-verbal.
We very quickly fell upon stories looking at grief and losing our fathers. So much of grief happens within yourself – it doesn’t involve speaking, it’s about how it feels, it’s about what you’re doing. It’s about the memories that you have. There’s a very big internal process, so visual storytelling really helps.
And there are elements of mime in the piece; sign mime, visual vernacular, all sorts of ways of telling stories with the body – we pull them all together for this piece to create one unified language that we hope speaks to the audience really clearly. It’s then layered with beautiful sound, projection, lighting, and set design.
All these elements come together to tell a story led by this central character, Arjun, that Rams is playing.
And what do we hope audiences will take away from it? Well, I guess we really hope they connect to the character; that they are moved, that they see another perspective on grief, the perspective that’s not often given stage time historically.
For George – Ad Infinitum have been in the forefront of theatre to disrupt and revolutionise audiences. I enjoyed experiencing your work online during lockdown. Are there plans to share Last Rites with a wider audience in this way after the tour?
George: I’m glad you enjoyed experiencing our work during lockdown! That’s really lovely.
I think actually that speaks to a big change that happened for our company, because it was during that time that we started to become interested in the digital realm and how our work might feature within it, online film and different ways of working.
We still exist fundamentally to create and tour theatre shows, but It added a whole new layer to what we do.
So we’re always thinking about digital now, and we’re excited about making films of our work and being able to share that really widely.
When we made Extraordinary Wall [Of Silence], we made a professional film of that show, worked really hard on it, edited it, and it ended up being a film that we’re very proud of, and that we are sharing internationally – it’s being screened and enjoyed and it’s amazing.
We hadn’t ever envisaged that happening, so in terms of Last Rites, it’s really exciting because there’s the potential for us to do the same thing and think of ways that we can share it, not just as a theatre show in a live performance setting, but also potentially in the future make a film of it and screen it and do all sorts of different and exciting things with it.
What’s happened is that now, when we make a project, it’s a project that has many different potential strands to it and can exist in different formats. And that’s really exciting, and we’re continually celebrating and exploring.
Of course, it always involves finding the funding, and you have to figure out how you’re going to do all these things, but yes, my hope is that Last Rites will reach a much wider audience.
For Ramesh – your work as a deaf theatremaker is intensely visual and deeply physical. Does this lend itself particularly to subjects that may be more difficult for creators, such as dealing with illness, death, or assault?
This depends – for me, being deaf I’ve more or less always thought visually. Certainly, my work has almost entirely been visual. I think it lends itself to thinking more abstractly and being able to deal with things in the abstract or at least symbolically.
I’ve always had to think in that way as words don’t always express the emotion, being visual I’ve had to show rather than say – my opinion is that a visual can have more power than a word, perhaps because the visual has a bit more context.
Image credit: Jack Offord