The Antigone Sound

29 May 2017

The Antigone Sound

A new work, based on Sophocles’ ancient play ‘Antigone’.

10 - 21 June

“Time will tell that the future’s ours!”

Toi Whakaari are proud to announce their term 2 productions, The Antigone Sound and Black Confetti. The Antigone Soundfeatures graduating third year actors collaborating with staff, former staff and graduates of the school. The creative and production teams bring together skilled practitioners alongside current students.

Sophocles wrote Antigone circa 496BC – 406 BC. Toi Whakaari director of actor training, Heather Timms and former associate director Penny Fitt are collaborating with graduates Ana Scotney and Comfrey Sanders on this exciting adaptation.

“Greek Theatre was made for the people about what was going on in the world,” says Timms. “We’ve re-imagined Antigone for ourselves now; the personal and the political in a performance arena.”

Antigone is a young woman, inside a crisis, standing up to power.

The question is: What if there’s no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’? What if everyone has got a ‘valid’ point of view? What happens when you drive your position home at the cost of relationship?

Fitt and Timms both formed theatre companies in their early twenties in London long before they met each other through Toi Whakaari.

Fitt is excited to be back at Toi as a creative contributor after retiring as associate director and head of design of the school at the beginning of 2017: “In The Antigone Sound we play with light, sonics, projection and scale to invite our audience to engage with a big story.“

Australian-born Heather Timms has directed and created an expansive body of work in England, Kenya, India, Australia and New Zealand, including a critically-acclaimed adaptation of Arundhati Roy’s Booker Prize-winning novel The God of Small Things. She is a writer, maker, teacher and performance director.

Penny Fitt worked in the UK until 2003, designing productions for the Bristol Old Vic Theatre Company, Dukes Theatre Lancaster, Octagon Theatre Bolton, Almeida Theatre London and the English National Opera Bayliss Programme. She co-created Penumbrafor the 2007 Auckland Arts Festival and The Trial of the Cannibal Dog for the 2008 New Zealand International Arts Festival.

Heather and Penny began working together at Toi Whakaari and together they directed Aki for Archives NZ, devising with students from across all disciplines, and then went on to create The Southern Corridor Project and Crossing Lines at the Cable Street Warehouse.

Comfrey Sanders is an actor, writer, theatre-maker and filmmaker. In 2014, she graduated from Toi Whakaari with a degree in acting. She is a member of A Slightly Isolated Dog Theatre Company.

Ana Chaya Scotney graduated from Toi Whakaari last year with a BPA in Acting for Stage and Screen. She is an actor and maker of films, theatre, music and illustration. For The Antigone Sound, she has co-written the text of the chorus (Ate) with Comfrey Sanders, as well as collaborating with Thomas Lambert on the sound, composition and music.

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