SUE MACLAINE (UK)
SICK! COMMISSION
UK PREMIERE (MANCHESTER)
16/03/15 – Z-ARTS, MANCHESTER
PRESENTED AS SUITABLE FOR DEAF AND HARD OF HEARING
Can I Start Again Please is a plea for articulacy and a quest for comprehension. A new performance work by Sue MacLaine that is both duet and duel. Two performers, two languages, one signed and one spoken, enter a linguistic challenge to represent traumatic experience, in particular that of childhood sexual violence. Can I Start Again Please was made in response to the current landscape of revelation and disclosure. It is both personal and political.
Sue MacLaine is a theatre maker, performer, writer and director. Sue is also a qualified British Sign Language/ English interpreter specialising in performance interpreting. Can I Start Again Please is designed to be experienced equally by hearing audiences and those whose first or preferred language is British Sign Language, without the mediation of an interpreter.
Previous works by Sue Maclaine include Still Life: An Audience with Henrietta Moraes and The Sid Lester Village Hall/Christmas Special with Emma Kilbey. She has collaborated with Tim Crouch and Andy Smith performing in what happens to hope at the end of the evening. In 2013 she won the Wooda Arts Award enabling the research and development of themes contained within Can I Start Again Please.
Nadia Nadarajah is an actor performing regularly with Deafinitely Theatre Company, most recently as Hippolyta/ Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Globe Theatre. Nadia is fluent in five sign languages and three written.
BRIGHTON – The performance was followed by a short presentation and post-show discussion with Prof. Antonia Bifulco (Lifespan psychologist and Head of the Department of Psychology at Middlesex University), in conversation with Sue Maclaine exploring the psychological impact of childhood abuse on later life experience. Antonia Bifulco is co-director of the Centre for Abuse and Trauma Studies, which seeks to combine health, social care and criminological approaches to issues of abuse.
MANCHESTER – The performance was followed by a short presentation and post-show discussion with Prof. Kathryn Abel (lead researcher for the Centre for Women’s Mental Health Research in Manchester), in conversation with Sue Maclaine exploring the psychological impact of childhood abuse on later life experience.
PARTNERS
Sue Maclaine
