At Applecart Arts on 17-18 Feb, Transit Productions stage their play, Places I Never Think About, created and co-performed by Rebeka Dio as part of the venue’s Springboard Festival.
Ticket link: https://applecartarts.com/in_the_theatre.php?id=4636&title=places-i-never-think-about-springboard-festival
What should audiences expect who come along to see Transit’s show?
We created Transit because we wanted to empower our communities and talk about our experiences of immigration and queerness without focusing on the trauma, which is what’s often expected of people from marginalised communities.
We instead elevate moments of joy, which is so powerful. There’s a lot of playfulness, but there is also a lot of heart, so we can’t guarantee you won’t need tissues.
We work a lot with oral tradition, so if you come to see us, you are sure to get a wide range of styles: live music, storytelling, queer characters, and the subverting of gender expectations.
Your show is part of Applecart Arts Springboard Festival – what’s the best thing about being part of this?
It’s always exciting to be part of a new festival, and meet other companies through that. Applecart Arts is such a great organisation, who work really closely with the local community, who we are very excited to engage with.
Applecart has been extremely accommodating by offering Pay-What-You-Can rehearsal spaces to the companies and helping us make our Sunday performance Babes-In-Arms, so people with little ones don’t have to miss out.
Immigration is a topic explored in many shows at the moment. What makes Places I Never Think About stand out, and why stage it now?
Eastern Europe is a bit of a forgotten place when it comes to discussing immigration even though Polish and Romanian people make up some of the largest immigrant populations in London.
We are a community that’s so isolated from each other, and the first wave of second-gen kids are just growing up, looking to connect to their culture.
There couldn’t be a better time to create shows like this.
Tell me about Transit Productions – what’s your mission and what’s next for you?
With Transit we want to continue making work that’s joyful and engaging. We want to continue to tell stories that are underrepresented and important to us.
We also want to continue to grow as a company and collaborate with other artists and creatives.
We are actually working on two other performances at the moment. One of them is going to be shown at Sprint Festival on 6th March at Camden People’s Theatre.
This Is What Dreams Are Made Of (a declassified British survival guide) is performed and created by the founders of Transit, Tatenda Matsvai, and Rebeka Dio.
In a couple of months, we are showing Waldrand a short production, which was commissioned for Poetry Plays at the Cockpit in collaboration with Theatre Voliere and Singing As Life Practice choir.
It will be shown on the 18th of April with a very large cast, polyphonic singing, festival masks and more!