Photo Flash: First Look at THERE SHE IS at Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2019

As the Edinburgh Festival Fringe reaches its middle point, Brazilian performer Gabriela Flarys releases atmospheric images of her show There She Is, "a strange, dreamlike, totally original creation that imagines the consequences of a whale showing up on the Tube" (Telegraph), which is running at the award-winning PQA Venues at the Royal Mile.

When a whale beaches on the London Underground, all hell breaks loose and communication abruptly ceases. A humorous one woman's surreal trip through the unintelligible babble of London as a beached whale breaks down all communication, There She Is by Gabriela Flarys is a show about language, displacement and recreation of oneself. From impressive physical theatre and contemporary dance, through uncanny impressions of London's denizens, Flarys' Edinburgh Festival Fringe first full month run is both poignant and funny. With an original script based on a series of interviews with people of different nationalities who live in London and speak English as a second language, anyone who's ever lived in a city will recognise the cabbies, the jobsworths, the depression and the optimism - the journey of self-obliteration before we create our identities anew. A comical, poetical and political combination of movement with spoken-word.

A perennially migratory mammal suddenly gets stuck. Something is displaced in the middle of the city while an uncomfortable feeling brews amongst its residents. Gabriela Flarys takes us on a journey through the eyes of a recently arrived immigrant to the city, the encounters along the way revealing subtle differences, where misunderstanding in verbal communication points out to new forms of perception and interaction. The possibility of finding oneself and a sense of belonging are explored against a backdrop of untranslatable words, displaced aquatic mammals and bewilderment at the sheer number of accents with which to contend.

'The foreigner is within me... we are all foreigners'. Julia Kristeva, psychoanalyst.

When humans migrate, there inevitably occurs a change on their 'self', due to the physical change of environment and all the small changes and self-learning that take place along the way. Written, co-directed, sound designed and performed by Gabriela Flarys, with co-direction and dramaturgy by Andrea Maciel, There She Is explores the idea of the 'foreigner': what is to be a foreigner to a place if we can many times be a foreigner to ourselves To be a foreigner is to experience displacement; when, in a new circumstance, far from our motherland or our safety zone, there comes the possibility of finding a new self or maybe of recreating oneself - even if, at the moment of displacement, that change is yet unknown. These moments are to be consciously embraced as a new self develops and comes up to the surface.

Gabriela and Andrea have both undergone extensive research into energetic physical training, exploring exhaustive states and seeking a refined connection to sensations as a crucial point of departure within the creative process. Andrea and Gabriela have started their artistic partnership in 2014 when devising the dance-theatre play Citybodymemory in which Andrea was the lead-creator and performer and Gabriela co-creator and performer, with the collaboration of the dramaturg Peter Peasey. Citybodymemory was created from a series of drifts around the city of Bristol and stories collected from interviews with Bristolians who talked about specific places in the city that triggered particular memories-sensations and was shown at the Wickham Theatre in Bristol in 2015. First performed as a work in progress for 8 nights in Edinburgh in 2018, There She is is the second collaboration between Andrea and Gabriela and will be receiving its full-length world premiere in Edinburgh this year.
@GabrielaFlarys #TheSheIs

Photo Credit: Alex Brenner

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