RHiannon Faith built her own pub. Or her set builders have. Installed in a theater, this is where she will perform her new show. “It’ll probably end up in my mom and dad’s backyard when we’re done,” she laughs. As is often the case in pubs, this will be the place where people can confess their secrets, and a place where a lonely person can find some solace.
Faith makes dance theater with a social conscience that looks into everyday life, often in the margins. Her latest work Drowntown (which has just toured to China) was about poverty and isolation, building on interviews with people in deprived English seaside towns. In 2018, Smack That (a Conversation) told stories about domestic violence, which took place at a party with popcorn and passing the package. Her previous work has been on mental health, including Faith’s.
After the gloom of Drowntown, the cast of Faith made a request. “The dancers said: ‘Can we have a little more humor in this, Rhiannon!’” she laughs. Lay Down Your Burdens promises some light alongside the darkness.
Last year Faith ran The Care Home Project in Harlow, Essex (she is an associate artist at the Harlow Playhouse), where anyone could come and talk about his life. They gave a performance and the group stayed in touch. One of the men had been homeless, now he writes poetry and comes to see Faith’s work-in-progress. Faith doesn’t just talk about community building, she does it. The Care Home’s experience led to Lay Down Your Burdens, which looks at the baggage people carry with them, the shame, trauma and fear. “Often it’s because that person hasn’t received enough care in their life,” says Faith. ‘They were not valued and did not feel like they belonged. They have spent their entire lives trying to cope with trauma, or living in poverty every day just to meet their basic needs, and there was no way they could feel safe.”
Faith suggests that “many people living at the bottom of society’s hierarchy feel more like they are being watched than seen.” She wants us to see some of those stories and characters as they really are, using her usual mix of text, testimonials, movement that taps into emotions, humor and some audience participation. “Let’s all make noise together, laugh together, get emotional together,” says Faith. The audience will sit in the round, and on bar stools in the “pub” for the brave. “It’s an invitation,” she says. “You don’t have to participate if you don’t want to.” Faith’s own energy is the kind that can make people open up.
As a child growing up in the West Midlands, she was ‘always twisting and moving’. A gym class where they had to do a Janet Jackson routine was her best day ever. She attended local dance classes, but was put off by the snobbish comments from other girls. “I didn’t have the right stuff. It all had to do with money.” But she was obsessed with movies, spending summers at a friend’s house with a vast video collection and rewinding VHS tapes to write out the scripts by hand. She took one to school. “I went to the director with the suggestion: we should attract Gypsy!” she recalls, “which is a bit inappropriate now that I think about it. I was probably 10 or 11.”
She comes from a large Irish Catholic working-class family; her father wrote novels and protest songs, her uncle wrote controversial plays about Irish politics, but neither had the chance to make a living from it. “It’s a privilege for me to be here doing this,” says Faith, 40, who after years of hustle and day jobs has recently been awarded Arts Council England National Portfolio Organization status, which means a three-year grant. With an aunt involved in trade unions and a sister who is now a human rights lawyer, activism is in her blood, but she was always drawn to performance. “It’s just what’s inside me, it’s just how I think,” she says.
Faith was lucky enough to have a great performing arts teacher in college who asked students to, for example, create and perform a new society for two weeks. Not so different from what she’s doing now, trying to imagine a different, kinder world. “I want to change the idea that there is a world where people have no hope because of their situation,” she says. “It feels unacceptable to me that someone walks through this life without feeling like they matter. What if we had this circle of compassion and no one was outside that circle? What if we said that’s not an option, what would that look like?” Faith admits she doesn’t have the answers, but she’d like you to grab a bar stool and join the conversation.