WALES ONLINE

Taking a bite out of the Big Apple

Sep 4 2008 by Jonathan Evans, Pontypridd Observer

BROADWAY is calling for one university lecturer who’s swapping Treforest for a stage in the Big Apple next month.

Rea Dennis, a senior lecturer in drama at the University of Glamorgan, will star at the Performing the World ’08 (PTW ’08) festival in New York from October 2-5.

She will join Brazilian actress Magda Miranda and dynamo Welsh community artist Miranda Ballin to present “performed stories of migration and place in cultural development”.

The festival is expected to attract more than 400 drama enthusiasts from across the United States and around the world.

The trio will present Train Tracks And Rooftops, a contemporary performance piece drawing inspiration from childhood places of refuge and with extracts from Rea’s solo work, Apart Of And Apart From.

Rea said: “Magda and I devised the piece to explore embodied memory of place.

“We have the Australian coastline of my childhood and the São Paulo inner city of Magda’s infused with our research of South Walian childhoods.

“The work plays with fixed boundaries and fixed identity positions through blending the autobiographies in the theatrical language. In a way we are asking where is place? Who owns place? Do I have a place?”

The performances offer metaphors for spatial and relational alienation and belonging in contemporary organisations and communities that are constantly negotiating transitional change.

For more information on PTW ’08, visit www.performingtheworld.org