Year Four: Julius Caesar
Our Community Chorus – local leaders and campaigners who joined the professional cast on tour
Julius Caesar, Shakespeare’s great political tragedy, is the perfect play for our age of crisis, asking questions about how far we’d go to shift power. This production explored what really makes a leader, as well as inviting questions about gender and power. Working closely with local Music Director, Xenia Horne, and RSC practitioners, our chorus developed their creative skills while exploring the nature of what makes a good leader today. The hope is that this chorus of community champions will continue to inform and challenge the work of Norwich Theatre and the RSC beyond the production. Working with people that lead for their community and understand the needs they serve, is invaluable in the Nation project’s mission to ensure the work is relevant to those we create it with and for.
Through workshops and masterclasses our Community Chorus explored voice and movement to create an elemental, tribal force, haunting Rome; evoking destruction and a spiritual, environmental reckoning beyond the story in the play.
‘As an RSC Partner Theatre, our co-creation with the communities we serve is at the heart of our theatre-making. We are incredibly proud of the actors involved. We continue to be amazed at the levels of trust shared, the depth of passion reached and volume of voices reflecting our diverse communities’, Miche Montague, Creative Communities Producer
Julius Caesar:
Atri Banerjee, director of Julius Caesar
I am a theatre director, not an activist, or a politician. I make theatre because I choose to believe it offers us a space wherein we might aspire towards utopia. In both rehearsal rooms and auditoriums, we bring together groups of people into a live, safe space, where we might be able to ask ourselves and each other the difficult, and dangerous questions.
Our ensemble – made up of both the professional company and our community chorus – is drawn from across the country and beyond. We work in collaboration, in rehearsal and in performance with audiences each night, to head towards a more complex understanding of the world, both for ourselves and for everyone around us. The company members’ own several identities and the negotiation of all these in relation to everyone else’s have fed into the show in ways that have been quite magical.
What is worth more, art or life? We might suggest, that art is itself life, and life is art. Art is a way of coming to terms with our own mortality, a means of resisting and comprehending the darkness.
Collaboration:
Meet the Norwich Group
The members of our Community Chorus lead or support a variety of local groups and causes, and were chosen for their inspiring contributions to their communities.
Rebecca White is CEO of Your Own Place, a homelessness prevention social enterprise providing creative workshops to those most at risk of homelessness across the East of England.
Alice Evans, from Sierra Leone, engages with her local community church, helping women and children to live healthier lives and supporting community activities.
Jeneska Alexander is a practitioner working with trans, non-binary and gender diverse young people, and a counsellor at a Norfolk eating disorder charity.
Melissa Bowling is a Hospitality Operations Manager at Norwich Theatre Royal, who works with different community groups, ensuring everyone gets the best out of their visit.
Rio Montana Topley works at Age UK Norwich, a charity focused on bringing people together in their local community to tackle isolation and loneliness.
Lucy Dalgleish is a teacher of performing arts at Ormiston Victory Academy who has led students in the RSC Playmaking Festival.
Helen Wells is a multimedia artist layering hand drawn animation, film, text, sound and performance to create work that has both personal significance and a connection to society and earth in which we live.