The Island

The Island

Athol Fugard, John Kane, Winston N’shona

2005 UC Davis, 2007 Nelson Theatre UC Irvine

The Island (2005, 2007) opened at UC Davis and was then invited to play at the Nelson Theatre in Irvine during a global conference on Transnational/Translating Theatre. This production featured two African American performers, James Marchbanks – a stunning local actor and Dahlak Brathwaite – a nationally lauded hiphop artist. This was very much an intercultural experiment, since at the time I had only been in the USA for three years, so we turned to the question the play asks, of how to improvise a play that itself was improvised before then being written down.  Working with these two African American actors, I approached the production as a way of using collaborative techniques for improvisation to understand the intercultural implications of the play through its initial processes of creation.