Being Carried
Being Carried is a new interdisciplinary theatre collaboration between Malaysia and the UK, combining monologues/text, movement, soundscapes, visual and spoken languages.
The performance will explore how we are carried and how we carry others – physically, practically, emotionally, metaphorically – from birth cradled in parental arms to being carried to resting places after death. It will consider power dynamics and hierarchies, the baseline of being human – care, intimacy, resilience. What is it to assist, to be assisted – to transport, convey, transfer, lug? What is it to hold and to be held and what relationships exist in this act of carriage?
An intimate chamber piece, Being Carried utilises traditional and innovative storytelling to reflect the beliefs, emotions and lived experience of disabled, Deaf and neurodivergent people in Malaysia. Funny, painful, full of fire and passion, these stories are informed by our grassroots community engagement with the disabled community, revealing perspectives rarely shared.
Until now.
From the acclaimed team of And Suddenly I Disappear, a 2017/18 Unlimited International commission, Being Carried expands on Kaite O’Reilly’s model of The ‘d’ Monologues, initiated for her 2012 Unlimited Cultural Olympiad commission (In Water I’m Weightless, NTW/Southbank) with collaborators Grace Lee-Khoo (Access Path Productions, Singapore), Wheelsmith (Malaysia/Singapore) and Ho Lee Ching (Malaysia).
