WILD ROOTS
The Project
A theatrical fantasy that glimpses into the journey of a young Canadian Caribbean woman as she explores spiritual connection to self through a unique series of events orchestrated by her Ancestors; specifically, the protagonist Sankofa. Held within a dream, song, dance & folkloric customs set the tone for this learning session as she confronts challenging parts of herself that she must work through. Taking a deeper look this play at the differences in how one may go about questioning old belief systems, cultural and societal norms.
The modality of healing becomes the landscape on which this story roots itself, using an interdisciplinary approach and perspective to narrate the story further exploring how intergenerational traditions can lend itself to self-discovery and healing.
Artists
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Jamila Shani Joseph aka Jai is a multidisciplinary creative from Montreal, Quebec. Her background in Afro-Caribbean dance, Classical Ballet, Modern, Jazz and branched out in her early 20's adding Singer/Songwriter to her resume and in the last 5years adding Emerging Actor and Playwright. Jamila has been a performance artist and choreographer for over two decades and the merge of these styles have been at the forefront of her creative practice. She has always found herself part of the performing arts community, always looking for new opportunities to expand her creative and artistic skills and knowledge. A past recipient of Black Theatre Workshop’s Victor Phillips award in 2002, Jamila has continued performing, creating, and studying her crafts. With the need to expand and explore her creative expression Jamila sought out safe environments that allowed her to be a creative black woman, in all her interdisciplinary ways and shades. 2017 – 2019 were highlight years as she had the pleasure of joining the acting casts of 'How Black Mothers Say I Love you', (actor) written by Trey Anthony (Black Theatre Workshop 2019) & Nicole Brooke's a Cappella “musical odyssey” 'Obeah Opera' (actor, dance performer, vocalist) (ASAH Productions 2019) in Toronto, with her debut stage role being back in 2017 where is portrayed 'Lady in Purple' in the Ntozake Shange's "For Colored Girls..."(McGill University' Tuesday Night Café Theatre) & the 2018 iteration of the same play produced by the cast ourselves (Les 6 Productions).
Theatre has opened her eyes to the possibilities of honing her skills as a playwright and in finding her milieu within her practice that merges modern, folk, and fantasy within the stories she tells and writes. Jamila strives to explore, develop and flourish works that are impactful in representing Black Canadian voices.
Currently, Jamila is continuing to hone her artistic practice and voice by curating her own path to creative freedom and development.
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Nalo is a Montreal-based artist, set, costume and prop designer of Caribbean origin. Her designs evoke rich associations through vibrant colour relationships, textured surfaces and varied materials. She uses this vocabulary to express underlying historical, cultural and psychological dimensions of stories enacted on screen and stage. Since she emerged from the Black Theatre Workshop Artist Mentorship Program’s 2017-2018 ensemble, Nalo has worked with numerous theatre and dance companies that include Black Theatre Workshop, Geordie Theatre and We All Fall Down on productions that explore themes of cultural identity, tolerance, acceptance, and hopeful futures. Recent projects include Simone Half and Half, directed by Quincy Armorer (Black Theatre Workshop’s Black History Month school tour presentation, February 2020); The Negroes are Congregating, directed by Natasha Adiyana Morris (A Piece of Mine Arts & Theatre Passe Muraille co-production, March 2020); Da Kink in my Hair, directed by Ray Hogg (An Arts Club Theatre Company production, April 2020 opening canceled due to Covid-19).
The Residency
Before the DDI
In the Montreal leg of the DDI, Wild Roots was the project in the earliest state of development. Very much still in the conceptual stage, there had been a short workshop at the MAI and a few pages of script written. Since it was so early in its lifecycle, there was a lot of room to explore new concepts and ideas around digital creation and design. As a starting point coming into the week, Jamila was asking questions like:
How do we now move forward in storytelling digitally while maintaining the integrity of the piece being worked on and the elements needed to convey the story and its lessons?
What technologies do I now need in order to shift my story from stage to a digital platform?
Where do I start when you are an amateur using technology to assist in creation and storytelling?
How does one keep from getting overwhelmed during a time like this?
Coming into the week, Jamila was most excited by the chance to explore the design of the piece. Prior to the residency, she had not had the opportunity to collaborate with a designer and was very interested in bringing in a new collaborator in the form of local designer Nalo Soyini Bruce. In addition to having a recurring design consultation with Nalo, Jamila was also scheduled to have consultations with the following experts:
Mishelle Cuttler - Sound Design
Shauna Janssen - Thresholds of Intimacy and Proximity
Emily Soussana - Digital Platform Selection
In pre-interview residency, Jai’s definition of Digital Theatre:
“Digital Theatre is a hybrid between digital platforms and traditional theatre, taking theatre in a new direction, opening a door for a new place for theatre to live. Digital theatre takes new technologies and techniques into play that we might not have used beforehand.”
— Jamila ‘Jai’ Joseph
During the residency
Throughout the week a focus was placed on visual design and dramaturgy and in the latter few days, some rapid prototyping took place to test proof of concepts. Prior to the residency, Jamila wasn’t sure exactly if this piece would occur digitally, in person or in a hybrid scenario and if it would be live or not. After discussions and consultations over the first two days, it was decided that this iteration would be digital only instead of also happening in person; it would however still be a live performance. This decision was made to not split focus and resources between what would in essence become two shows. The feeling of liveness was also very important to Jamila because of the stakes it gives the performance and because of how it changes the experience of the actor.
Colour very quickly became an important theme of the piece and through using tools such as Miro the team was able to collaborate and discover ways of integrating colour into the storytelling. Colours were attached to specific characters, themes and eventually sound motifs.
After the presentation by Mishelle Cuttler around sound design, the sonic world started to come into greater clarity and thoughts around the creation of musical themes and how these individual themes play together to create larger scores.
Towards the end of the week some answers around what the container of the show started to emerge. The journey of the main character, Mila, is one of healing and self-discovery and so it was important that the audience be welcomed and held in a warm and safe way. Conversations around this led to concepts of a more holistic online experience. Unlike the experience of live theatre where the patron is welcomed into the space beforehand and then able to chat and digest the piece with others afterward, digital theatre can often feel abrupt and harsh. It can be disconcerting at the end of a stream when the content and ability to chat with others (if that was an option in the first place) is cut off. Discoveries were made during the residency around how to welcome the audience and hold the space for their own journeys in getting to and experiencing the piece.
Instead of just a simple streaming setup, explorations were made towards a more custom web experience. Concepts around the audience being able to exist in it before and after the “performance ends” as well as how the narrative of the show changes the visual landscape of the platform were discussed.
In the latter half of the week, the team moved into a rapid prototyping and physical discovery phase. The goal of the experimentation was to quickly test out different concepts and allow Jamila to experience first-hand what some of the possibilities might be. Through working with experts in OBS and TouchDesigner and in consultation with Nalo some of the work that had been discussed earlier in the week was put into practice.
In the post interview after the residency week, Jamila’s definition of Digital Theatre was:
“A platform where you can take a story and tell it in every and any way imaginable. The possibilities are endless there. It’s a new platform of creative freedom, of creative storytelling, it's a platform to get stories out to more people. It’s a new world of storytelling.”
— Jamila ‘Jai’ Joseph
Post Residency
When asked about some of her takeaways from the week, Jamila mentioned how learning about what is possible technically has really helped her writing process. Even if she doesn’t know exactly how the technology works, knowing what can be done allows her to free her creative brain to write without getting bogged down in the details.
Coming into the residency, Jamila was worried that she would need to give up some of the integrity of her work or lessen the themes of what she was going to tackle if she performed on a digital platform. In her exit interview, she mentioned how that fear had been removed through learning about other people’s projects and seeing that despite being in a digital world these deeper topics are still able to be explored.
Moving forward, Jamila is most excited to continue exploring the design elements of the piece and how they interact with the story. She had composed music for the show beforehand and now is interested in picking it apart and really investigating how to integrate it into the piece. In addition to design, movement is also an element that now feels ready to be explored in a deeper way.
Tools Used
OBS was used on the first day of rapid prototyping. Jamila was able to move in front of the greenscreen and OBS was used to roughly chromakey out the background. Various concepts were then able to be tested such as:
Overlaying the actor with themselves, mirroring them, changing scale
Overlaying colour & gradients on the actor as well as using selective colouring to isolate one hue at a time
Using layers of different colour chroma keys
Using green screen tape and removable vinyl to create cut-outs to different textures and colours on the body itself
The second day of experimentation took the ideas worked out on day one with OBS and took them a step further using TouchDesigner
The green screen was used again to isolate the body but now the body was able to function as a particle emitter, creating a form of aura
The concept of 2D objects existing in a 3D world was explored allowing Jamila to play more with the transformation of scale and immersing the actor in the digital world.
NDI and virtual camera tools were used to take the live composited scene and send it, along with the raw camera feed to collaborators working remotely
Miro was used as an organizational and real-time, long-distance collaboration tool.
