March 15th – April 9th 2016, at The Yard Theatre in Hackney Wick
How do you acknowledge the exceptional situation of being white, from the inside, without saying all the wrong things?
For starters, you quote from a website: “As Jason Katz argues in the film Tough Guise: Violence, Media, & the Crisis in Masculinity, the way in which domination operates is that the dominant group is often rendered invisible and thus is unexamined. When we talk about race we normally think about African American, Latino, Asian; when we talk about sexual orientation we think homosexual, bisexual, transgender; when we talk about gender we think female. Rarely do we really look at the dominant group — as if white isn’t a racial category, as if heterosexual isn’t a sexual orientation, and as if males don’t have a gender. So if we’re talking about racial issues specifically, part of what it means to be white is to not have your personal character flaws or actions attributed to your race.”
In part devised in workshop with performers Souad Faress, Nisha Nayar and Nina Logue, Made Visible is a play based on a supposed “real encounter” in Victoria Park with two strangers, about white privilege and white accountability.
Nothing will be solved, and everything will be messy. This is not about guilt and confessions, but honesty. However far that can get us.
Directed by Stella Odunlami. Starring Mia Soteriou, Anjali Mya Chadha and Haley McGee.
★★★★ “A meta theatre show that is funny, frank and self-aware.” – Lyn Gardner, The Guardian
Deborah Pearson 