Hedda.

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This performance piece is a re-imagining of Henrik Ibsen’s realist play, Hedda Gabler.
The play tells the story of the title character Hedda, who, feeling trapped in a domestic life resulting from her marriage, and faced with social failure, takes her own life and that of her unborn child. In Hedda Gabler, Ibsen’s realist framework makes it impossible for his characters to exist outside the social, economic, political constraints which shape the conventional social context, making the victimization of his female character inevitable.

This piece explores ways of challenging the traditional victimization of female characters by changing the way their stories are told. This is an attempt to give body and voice to the inner journey Hedda Gabler is experiencing and which is silenced in Ibsen’s writing. 

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Video of research process (and a few words about this process):

During the research and creative process of the piece, I explored using different physical vocabularies in an attempt to move away from realist daily actions which confined Hedda to the domestic space. I moved my work out of the rehearsal room, into the wild. I could experiment with how one's natural surroundings can influence the pace, quality of the physical score.


The text, written in the third person, attempts to give voice to Hedda, allowing her to speak out and shares her story in her own words, through her own perspective.  She can thereby attempt to move away from the roles she is assigned to in Ibsen's play as the mother, the wife, the lover and the daughter... 

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