Can We Talk About Love

Perceptions of love and gender

concentric circles is delighted to announce Can We Talk About Love, an international participatory theatre project supported by Arts Council England and Norfolk County Council. 

In partnership with Proscenium, an independent Hungarian theatre company based in Slovakia, the project explores the ways in which women experience love. The subjective nature of love here is also bound up in perceptions of gender. What does it mean to be a woman today? How do we define our gender identity? How do we perform it?

Against the backdrop of a global pandemic that knows no borders, Can We Talk About Love seeks to create a community of theatre practitioners and audiences, regardless of physical distance and open to all.

The all -female project culminates in two productions presented online. The first is a contemporary European text  – Illusions by Ivan Viripaev – and Contemporary Love Monologues, an original text co-authored by the public.

 

Illusions by Ivan Viripaev

English translation by Cazimir Liske, Hungarian translation by András Kozma

Saturday 1st August 2020

I realised that love has no rules or formulas. I realised that love is just love. It exists however and with whomever it wants. Love is this force that exceeds all boundaries and destroys all barriers…

Illusions, a dark comedy about two married couples, is a little story about love and death and our great desire to create narratives that give meaning to our lives. Ivan Viripaev, Russia’s foremost contemporary playwright, takes the spectators through a hall of mirrors where nothing is quite as it seems.

This production will be performed by an all female cast of British and Hungarian performers. Following a 5-week rehearsal period, with weekly public open rehearsals, the production will premier online and followed by discussions with the creative team. 

The production will be directed by concentric circles’ Artistic Director, Adina Levay with Lorna Hale from MA Theatre Directing, UEA, as assistant director. Design is by Erika Gadus from Budapest, who works internationally in both film and theatre and the original musical score is by Hungarian composer and singer Klaudia Gardeno. 

The performance will be in English and Hungarian with English subtitles. 

concentric circles was granted licence to present Ivan Viripaev’s Illusions by Rosica Colin Ltd, London, in conjunction with Henschel SCHAUSPIEL Theaterverlag Berlin GmbH.

The opening night will be broadcast online as a ticketed event. The production will then be available to watch back between 1st and 31st August 2020 at concentric-circles.org.

Buy tickets

Contemporary Love Monologues 

Contemporary Love Monologues kicks off with a series of creative writing workshops, offered to 10 participants who will create monologues based on personal stories. The co-authored text will be rehearsed and presented online by the participants and members of the cast of Illusions. This production seeks to create a chorus of female voices, cross-cultural and cross-generational, and invites people who identify themselves as women including those from the LGBTQ and Hungarian minority communities to take part in the co-creation of this production.

The workshops will be led by Norwich based writer, tutor and activist, Belona Greenwood.

The performance will be directed by Adina Levay and Kate Cox, a graduate from the MA course in Theatre Directing from the University Of East Anglia, will be the assistant director.

Editor’s notes

concentric circles is an independent theatre company based in Norwich bringing together theatre makers and spectators from across Europe to explore issues that affect us as individuals and as societies. The company is led by founding theatre director Adina Levay.

Adina Levay is a theatre director and the Producing Artistic Director of concentric circles theatre company in Norwich. Born in Romania, Adina trained as an actor at the Hangar School of Performing Arts in Budapest and as a theatre director at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London, where she graduated with an MA in Advanced Theatre Practice. Currently she is on an MA Course in Creative Entrepreneurship at the University of East Anglia. Previously Adina was the Artistic Director of the Jókai Theatre in Slovakia and worked as Associate Director at the New Theatre in Budapest and the Miskolci National Theatre in Hungary.

Illusions by Ivan Viripaev is more of a text than a conventional play that centres around four characters – two married couples. Their entwined lives are narrated by a cast of actors, who do not play these people as much as they construct and reconstruct theatrical illusions of individual subjects. The production has been translated in several languages and presented across Europe and in the US.

Ivan Aleksandrovich Viripaev (Russian: Ива́н Алекса́ндрович Вырыпа́ев; born August 3, 1974) is a Russian playwright, screenwriter, film director, actor and art director. He is a leading figure in the Russian New Drama movement.

For more information: [email protected]

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