Andrea Mbarushimana reflects on her Nest residency

I’m a writer and artist. I have mostly written poetry and my third pamphlet was published last year by Knives Forks and Spoons Press. I was also a core poet for the BBC Contains Strong Language Festival last year. This year, to capitalize on that success, I quit my day job to become a full-time freelance writer. Over the course of this year, my overwhelming desire is to focus on fun, risk and exploration in my work, in order to revive my poetry practice and write a novel.

I recognize that my interactions with people form a crucial part of my creative process. I was immediately attracted to the Hatching Residency opportunity at the Nest, which would allow me time to work with people in a focused environment, to get under the skin of a new writing form.

I am friends with people who love theatre and I’m friends with people who don’t like it at all. I wanted to explore barriers to theatre people experience and also do fun, creative activities with my interviewees that could help them see theatre differently. Alongside the opportunity for mentoring, I wanted to find out from the community what experience people are looking for when they choose theatre. (Or what they are avoiding when they don’t chose it!)

My residency got off to a sticky start. I was halfway through my first day when I tested positive for Covid and the whole thing was put back a month and a half. Instead of doing three days per week for two weeks, this meant I had to condense my time into one week and an extra day.

Did I hatch anything? Yes, several things! I wrote a short play for the Whale and got the idea for a much longer play from one of my interviewees. The creative activities I collaborated on with the people I brought in also kindled their creativity, which was great. One of them has written a monologue that I hope will be performed, another wrote poetry and was inspired to draw.

Here is a poem I wrote inspired by a conversation with O about her wish to see more black, female superhero characters in drama.

The Lament of the Invisible Supergirl

My blessings have turned on me

like a dog that bites

It is a gift, they told me

to be able to erase myself

I walk into a room unnoticed

they call it power

But I feel I’m disappearing

with each good deed

The more I give

The more I lose myself

Over the course of the residency, I discovered that I work best in intense bursts lasting up to 3 hours, but that after that I need to be doing something completely different. If I did a residency again I would probably organise it in half days instead of whole days. That would also give me chance to spend more time with other people, over lunch for example. I really appreciated having somewhere to go that began to feel like my own studio. I filled that empty room with stuff and was able to immerse myself in the ideas in a way I never could have managed in our chaotic home. 

It was illuminating listening to people talk about theatre from different perspectives. I’d deliberately chosen a diverse group of people to interview. It did sometimes feel like we were being shadowed by the ghosts of past theatre experiences. Quite a few of my interviewees had one brilliant and almost life-changing experience of the theatre that all their experiences since compared unfavourably with. Overwhelmingly, people had had negative experiences though. My interviews suggested that people engage with theatre at a personal level which often highlights previous experiences of disaffection. Perhaps this shouldn’t have been a surprise – theatre presents a microcosm of our society, often viewed through a privileged lens. For a lot of my interviewees, theatre feels like a risky way of spending your money if you want to have a good night out.

To record these barriers to inclusive/diverse theatre and people’s suggestions of how to overcome them, I drew a mind map (below).

My own attempts to write theatre are in their early stages, but I’ll definitely be trying to incorporate some of this awareness into my work. I hope I can convince you to engage with it in the future, at a theatre/carpark/field near you.

Massive thanks to Talking Birds, everyone at the nest and all the people I interviewed: Rose, Leigha, Monica, Dangermouse, Olu, J-P and my Monday Writing group who also spent time thinking about Theatre with me.