Ringside

Mem Morrison requests the pleasure of your company at the town hall. Take a front row seat, join the family and meet the many potential brides at his long overdue wedding reception.

From behind the big hair and a seven-tier wedding cake a flicker of hope peers; an intimate attempt to belong to a culture, to a family and to someone.

Mem Morrison’s new production Ringside draws on a lifetime of remembered Turkish Cypriot family weddings, testing traditional values by breaking the silence and changing history forever. Will it be Mem’s turn next? Ringside is a site-specific celebratory performance designed for civic and town hall spaces. Using the celebration and rituals of remembered wedding receptions as it’s foundation Ringside explores issues surrounding autobiography, identity, sexuality, memory, culture and self-censorship and one-time childhood fantasies and how they so easily could have become a reality. Ringside is part written, devised and performed with a group of 30 local female co-performers, playing the roles of Mem’s potential wives and wedding guests.

“I know as a theatre maker and performer how fragile you are, Mem has found this way of letting people in, inviting us all in to be part of the whole process is just great. He is professional, fun, patient, calm and has a strong vision which he clearly brings across. Just watching him direct all of us is so fascinating and inspiring, that is why i am there, in the room with him, to learn, to watch, to work.”

Participant, Dordrecht

Supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England and commissioned by SPILL Festival of performance. Co-commissioned by Birmingham Repertory Theatre, ICIA University of Bath and Fierce! Festival with support from New Wolsey Theatre:Ipswich and Nuffield Theatre, Lancaster.