Thinking big

The co-creator/co-director of Two Gents Productions - Tonderai Munyevu is a joy to speak to. So we did. This post is our conversation.

Introduce yourself!

So, my name is Tonderai and I am an artist – I would say.  I am a writer and an actor and a theatre maker.

And why do you do what you do?

Well, I think – fundamentally – the honest answer is never really the one that I give because it’s so batshit crazy (!)  And it’s so exposing…  The reason I do what I do is that – I think that when I was very young I thought I was very special and that I had some sort of insight into things and that I was here to do something – you know?  And I spent a large part of my childhood thinking – what is this great thing that I’m going to do?  Because I’ve been brought here to do something great.  And then, when I saw the priest in my missionary boarding school in Zimbabwe, I thought – oh, that’s it.  To stand on a pulpit and do all of that.  And then that changed as time went on.  Meanwhile, I moved countries.  I have this – kind of – trans identity of gender as well.  And so, I think I saw a lot of things from different perspectives.  And I think, somehow, somewhere, it kind of collated itself into really thinking that that’s my offering – this idea of what I feel of the different cultures.  Because I was always outside of something, always watching it, always digesting and dissecting. I think, now, a great deal of what I do, is to think of an idea that I think would translate and would entertain and that would be worthy of the time that one has to give any endeavor.  Whatever it is, at the core of it, is something really, really worth saying.  So, that’s why I do what I do.

You said the word “offering”.  Who are you offering to?

To the world.  And I always think, that actually there are a certain group of people in the world who are a microcosm of the rest of the world, who engage with my work and who are waiting for my work.  So, that is that offering to those people.  With Two Gents, a lot of what we’ve done has had such a legacy.  We’re always thinking about what we end up doing, because we know that there is a legacy around it.  And then, for me, personally, just the kind of friends and colleagues and, um – fans! – that one accumulates.  There’s a group of people who know the work.  They may be small, but I always think, they’re just a real pixel of what may ultimately be a collective – a community -  of people around the world who are interested in the same things that I am interested in, and who are delighted with my take on how to deal with those things. And I have people who I feel are not necessarily famous or established who I feel the same way about, whose work I always, always wait for and I’m excited by and I find will just thrill me in some way.

So, what I’m hearing is about community and sharing and communion.  Here we are in a pandemic, where the primary, overriding characteristic is isolation. Tell me about all of what you just said, in light of where we are now.

It’s tricky, isn’t it?  I don’t know if the answers are there in terms of moving forward.  I had a play postponed and I was talking to the producers about it, and we were like – well, when is the right time to come back?  Because we know a lot of the community that we serve, is very vulnerable - whether it is the slightly older white middle class people, who, traditionally, have been such a support.  Partly because they understand the history of Zimbabwe and because they have the income to do so (to come) and partly because they’ve been seeing the work for so long.  Those people are vulnerable and you don’t want to put them in that space.  We know that black people are vulnerable at this time and you don’t want to put everybody in the space like that.  We know that Africans are really challenged, because they have to survive, but they also have family back home that they have to now really take care of because the shutdowns in places like Zimbabwe or South Africa are not necessarily coming with financial aid.  So, there’s a lot there – one can easily feel helpless.

But I think, one of the things that I’m trying to do, is to try as much as possible to think of ways (and we’re doing that quite a bit with Two Gents, also) – how do we make that work that is not replacing the work that we would have done (so – you know – it’s not going to be a theatrical experience).  What, instead, can we actually do that is befitting this time?  For me, I’m contributing as much to things like this, I’ve got an audio play that I’ve committed to write (which I haven’t done yet) and I’ve written a couple blogs.  So, I have tried, without pressure, to kind of keep some sort of conversation going. 

I am writing.  I’m writing several pieces that are all in different stages and one of the pieces I committed to writing, which I’m really going to kick off in a couple weeks (a brand new piece) was very specific about what it was.  And I think isolation is making me look at those characters – not the story, but just making me look at those characters very, very differently.  I think that I’m much more concerned with those characters being absolutely polished because I now know that each individual person has a life.  Because I’m now experiencing my own individual life in a very different way.  Normally I’m quite social and I engage quite a bit.  Now, it’s really, really clear to me – each person has real agency.  So –  that isolation has been really, really profound, actually.

This is a two-parter – where do you think theatre will land, both in the near future and generally going forward and then, with that, where do you think your future will land, or – going forward – what your future will be, with this experience?

I’m quite positive, partly because, that is the only option!  That’s the option I have – positivity.  Because, actually, if you’re a little bit positive, you do come up with more ideas. At Two Gents, at the core of Two Gents, we had no lighting, we had no additional sound.  Anything you wanted done, you’d have to make it vocally, or stamping your feet or hitting something.  We’ve changed since then, because it’s quite tiring to make it work that way.  I was always about that “acoustic” theatre.  But now, what I’ve realized (and I think that theatre might end up doing the same thing) is that – actually, there is a level of communication that happens with technology.  I think that technology is going to be less “other” in the theatre.  It’s going to be part of the language now.  Because everybody recognizes it.  Everybody has had to find, in this isolation time, their own [way of] leaning into that. I think it’s going to be layers.

I think social distancing will come to theatre. I’ve been resisting that though, because there’s no point, is there.  You’re going to play to a fifth of your audience.  But I think social distancing would be very, very interesting within a theatrical landscape.  I think there will be a ring of emptiness around each person that I think will be theatrical in itself.  You know, as a director, I think – what would I do with an audience that is isolating?  What is the best way?  And I’ve thought a lot about outdoor theatre or theatre that’s going to happen in big warehouses or big spaces, where you have almost a sculptural sense of controlling the audience.  So, they might enter into the space and by the time they’ve gotten to Point A, the person who was already in Point A has gone to Point B.  It’s a collective experience but it’s happening just with a little bit with a time delay.  Obviously, with my work, it’s going to end up very different because I don’t really do that large, large, large scale kind of work.  But I think that’s what is going to be exciting.

Reassembly – the idea that we’ve all been isolated and now - what is the big thing that is going to make us come back?  I think that is going to happen.  I think that one, big thing that is going to set it (the return to theatre) off, will happen.  It’s hard to predict what it will be.  But there’ll be one, big fuck off thing where everybody will be – “I don’t care what I get, I’m going!”  It’ll probably be football or something! “I’m ABSOLUTELY going to be there!  Kill me!  Alive or dead, I’m going! And I don’t care how many people are going to get Corona, I’M GOING!”  I think that something - something just as shifting will happen. For me – I think I’m just going to be bolder.  There has been a sense with my work with embracing the smallness of it and the specificity of who I speak to. I can continue to do this and a kind of artisan way of working.  I’m going to lean in to making the work larger and just embracing that there are lot more people than I currently serve.  I think it’s just time to allow the work to be bigger.

It’s interesting – isolation, in one’s head – you get the picture of things becoming smaller and smaller and you speak of embracing the largeness of it, the “capacity to be bigger”.  In shutting down, you are allowed to explode.

It’s allowed me to think a little bit about why I wasn’t embracing it before.  And, I think, a lot of it had to do with survival.  When you are surviving, as artists – as black artists in England, you know, I literally was working myself to the bone, just to create some sort of momentum.  The forced settlement has allowed me to achieve the things I want to achieve, bigger.  Actually, I need to stop all the other things that were distracting me from that one thing. I think not working, not having to be somewhere and, to some extent, just being kind of financially stable, has made me, for the first, time, not focus on survival but focus on being. I can just be.

 http://www.twogentsproductions.co.uk/

More on post pandemic productions here.