In the second of Volcano's The Shape of Things to Come performance series (which opens this week with Sean Wai Keung's All We Knead), a woman decides to say goodbye to life as she knows it, and to live instead as a sheep.
The idea behind this series of commissions is to encourage performers to develop new performance modes in front of small enthusiastic audiences. We particularly want to encourage performers who engage with the future, the becoming or “not yet” of subject matter and mode of performance. The pieces are performed in various spaces at Volcano's venue in Swansea High Street.
The Beauty of Being Herd (6 - 8 July) by Ruth Berkoff is a funny, playful, and tender show with comedy and song, about a woman who is desperate to fit in and who tries too hard to be liked. It’s about how she embarks on an unusual journey to find her own strength and her own voice. But does she leave in the end?
Ruth Berkoff is a hardworking and versatile Northern actor and writer, passionate about connection and laughter. She loves acting and recently found out that in modern screenplays women aged 42–65 get just over 20% of the words given to men the same age. She’s 42 this year and intends to speak her own words before they're taken from her mouth.
When Ruth had a brain haemorrhage six years ago, she couldn’t find stories from other survivors, so she wrote her own. Her blog has been read by thousands. She writes and performs to give courage and confidence and to others and to help them feel less alone.
The other artists to appear in the series, which runs throughout July and early August, are Sara Hartel, Rebecca Batala, Aasiya Shah and Marianne Tuckman.