The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
Fault Lines
“Fault Lines is a fashion catwalk show with a difference,” says Katherina Radeva, co-artistic director with Alister Lownie of the Scottish Borders-based theatre company Two Destination Language. “On this catwalk we see six very different women, who between them create a physical and visual piece of theatre.”
These performers are a diverse group, chosen by co-creators Radeva and Lownie to represent a range of female identities, including Radeva’s 12-yearold sister Damyana, whose story of near-death experience was told in the company’s hit debut show Near Gone; performer and BSL interpreter Caroline Ryan; Cindy Awor, who describes herself as a Scot from Uganda; Welly O’brien, a disabled dancer who performs with a prosthetic leg; Scottish-bahraini performer Hannah Yahya Hassan; and performer and stage manager Rachel
Glower. “It’s kind of a dance piece,” continues Radeva. “What you see is this incredible catwalk of different identities, it’s a very fun piece of theatre – and part of what makes this so is the audio soundtrack, which is like a personal silent disco. Before you go into the theatre you download an app, through which you can listen to any one of three music or three spoken word channels.
“This means every single audience member has a different experience of the work. What we hear affects what we are seeing, and here we use a guilty pleasures soundtrack of pop music by contemporary female artists, channels of music by more feminist music artists and female composers – of which we have very little – as well as interviews with the women onstage.”
Another channel looks at the Englishlanguage through the perspective of a non-english person – Radeva is Bulgarian, Lownie is a Scot – and the final soundtrack concentrates on description of these people and events.
“This last channel is very important,” says Radeva, “because, really, the work is about how we perceive people. In that first 30 seconds when you meet someone, you make up a story about them – we’re all guilty of making a set of assumptions. Fault Lines is trying to go deep beneath those assumptions and show that so many different things make up who we are, so many different experiences affect how we perceive the world. I want people who see it to talk about it afterwards, and to feel like they’ve had a very good night out.
“Most people won’t have seen anything like it,” says Radeva, “but it’s extraordinary fun, a visual and audio feast. It’s a celebration of difference – very often we’re afraid of what we don’t know but this show says that when cultures come together we all learn from each other.”