Ella Gilbert says making theatre in Iran was better than she ever imagined.
Ella Gilbert says making theatre in Iran was better than she ever imagined.
When Wellingtonian Ella Gilbert went to Singapore for a drama schools' conference, the last thing she expected was for it to take her to an underground theatre company in Iran.
Gilbert, now 24, befriended students from the University of Tehran after watching them perform scenes from Shakespeare's Hamlet at theconference. She says they used movement and physical theatre in a way she'd never seen and she wanted to learn more.
Returning home to finish studies at Te Kura Toi Whakaari O Aotearoa-New Zealand School of Drama, Gilbert and friend Poppy Serano started a crowdfunding campaign and, six months later, found themselves in the hurly-burly of Tehran.
"We landed in a massive city filled with people who are incredibly intellectual and political with an energy I'd never encountered before," she says of the 2016 trip. "I'm used to charging ahead but for a while there, I couldn't keep up. I think it taught me to slow down, to look at things a bit more closely but I loved it."
Gilbert and Serano spent a month working with an Iranian theatre company and attending the country's biggest theatre festival. She got to work on her solo show Soft Tissue, originally called Gaggle, before coming home and performing it on marae, in prisons and at Massey University.
Last seen as a two-timing bride and troll princess in Peer Gynt, Gilbert will now perform Soft Tissue at the Basement's boutique studio theatre this week, saying it explores the masks we put on to please different people in diverse situations.
She saw a lot of that in Iran, with people conforming to laws and rules they fervently disagree with but still finding ways to celebrate a country and culture they're extremely proud of.
"I'd go to places like the Caspian Sea and they would say, 'isn't this just the most beautiful ocean you have ever seen?'", Gilbert says, adding that Iranians were always keen to know more about the haka. "They are so proud of their country and it is full of generous people who love to party, celebrate and share their culture and landscapes; such amazing landscapes!"
Gilbert was surprised to find a vibrant theatre scene, stunning performance complexes and a thriving underground arts scene where theatre-makers create works that censorship stops them from staging more publicly.
