Producer Karla Grosser Actor Dorothée Karekezi Artistic director and dramaturg Ida Johannessen
Musician/ Band *Olicia
Props & Stage Manager Molly Henningsen
Documentarian Rigmor Børge Ranthe
Actor(Voice) Kevin Creedon Actor ??? Actor ???
Stage Design Anne Bjørg Kloster
TITLE EXPLAINED
WORKSHOP & TEAMWORK
FEMALE REPRESENTING ON AND OFF-STAGE
SOCIAL ISSUES
AUDIO / EXTRA ARCHIVED
The title explained that when you are devoted to someone, you prioritise their needs over your own. The devotion for this story to be told has not been beneficial to the women in the family lineage and they all struggle with not having a mother figure and several failed marriages.
Workshops and teamwork make the dream work. Here, we will explore the European identity and generational stories of three women. We conduct workshops that delve into the cultural and social backgrounds on each generation, learning from eachother.
Female presenting and representation on and off stage It's a meaningful story told by strong feminists, but we're all just humans trying to understand the world. As both the writer and the artistic directing developing the narrators complexity, happens in collaboration with the performer and creative team. I feel a strong desire to tell an important story about female empowerment. Through my role as the writer, I want to explore and ensure that this story is told in the best possible way, while also reflecting on our journey to just that. Additionally, as I work with Vicky, I learn more about the character and her struggles and work towards staying true to her story. Vicky is a writer in the story, working on a book that explores her family history and breaks from the constraints of tradition. It's a powerful narrative.
Social issues – To ensure the authenticity and sensitivity of the play, the production has a deep interest in involving informative women real experience in the professional creative process.
Audio / an extra sample – To truly understand the power of sound, it is essential to delve into its essence and experience its flavour. I have included an audio sample that showcases my latest collaboration with musician Emil Johannessen for my short film Farvel, which premiered in Ireland in January 2024. This sample sound explores the sound of keeping hope amidst a traumatic event. The other sample is the everyday sound of boiling water in the kitchen kettle. The sound in this play aims to strike a balance between using sound to uncover trauma, everyday rituals, and the need for hope for a brighter future for women. Through sound, I investigate how it can help the story dive deeper into the narrative mind and surroundings, ultimately breaking free from familial lineage structures.
Note – While the moodboard and the making of the play take great inspiration from a real story, the life and family of the author and writer Tove Ditlevsen and her impact on Danish culture and history – my research is taking on the urgency to study and have a story to be told in the community and voices of women in Europe. Taking Tove Ditlevsen life into account her story is deeply embedded in me as a Danish artist and my urge to have a more authentic female lineage told and strong female voices on stage.
Dramatised or not – This family in the play doesn’t exist and the story in the play isn't real but fiction. The mood board explores inspirational conversation of the generation, the interest in staging rituals, female generational storytelling and, more specifically the want of staging everyday rituals.
Concept statement
In the play "Yours, Devoted", we follow Vicky on a journey of discovery as she uncovers her family's hidden secrets. Her mother, Ellen had kept a ring binder named "Secrets" that documented dark untold stories. The play takes place in a world of magic realism, as Vicky experiences grief and sadness over her mother's trauma. She imagines her mother and grandmother's company going through the secrets. Vicky is determined to expose the dark and harmful behaviours that have been passed down through generations of women. She is committed to breaking the cycle of destructive patterns and preventing them from being inherited and passed on to her daughter. Through her story, Vicky reminds us of the power of acknowledging negative behaviour patterns and discussing them openly, to prevent their perpetuation into the future. It's time to let go of the shame and negativity of the past and make way for positive patterns that can strengthen us. By listening to Vicky's story, we take the first step towards this journey of self-discovery and healing and pave the way for a better future.
The play introduces magical realism to explore the theme of grief and strong bonds. Vicky is accompanied by her deceased mother and grandmother, and through small moments of humour, the play relives their complex and unconditional love. Although the play focuses on trauma, it also highlights small moments of life with a comedic perspective.
The concept of location
I am interested in creating theatre that has a world we resonate in but it's a creative imaginary world of its own. The setting is a somewhere feeling of being in a lived home. The stage has a sense of being a piece of loved whole home and the atmosphere can spark the imagination or, conversely, carry the weight of the people who lived in the house history. I choose to work with these spaces of a home cause I also fantasise and want to raise awareness of a political issue that there in Ireland is a need for more accommodations.
The play takes primarily place in a staged living room/ study with an entrance to a kitchen you never see but only hear in the sense that tea is being made during the play.
Methaphorically choosing home as a setting, I want to break down the walls and go deeper into the conflicts in a three generational lineage of strong female artists.
The drama starts with Vicky finding her mother's “secrets”. Vicky´s mother, Ellen, has passed away and left archieved secrets that have been kept away from the public. When dealing with the secrets, Vicky is joined by her mother Ellen, and her grandmother Irma as Vicky awakens from a hallucination of their company while grieving over the family history.
The play follows Vicky's quest to find a box of her mother's belongings called "Secrets," which reveals Ellen and her grandmother's experiences. Additionally, the poems in the text, will bring a comforting and dramaturgical story to the play. I intend to tell a story that highlights a female-led ensemble. The play uses the female body's appearance, silence, and everyday sounds to create an atmosphere that highlights the quality of the bonds between the characters. The Three-Act structure leads to a climax in Act One when three letters from Victor to Ellen reveal an abusive relationship. In Act Two, the truth is revealed about how Irma knew about every secret in Ellen's life but did not help take care of them. The climax of Act Two is when Vicky confronts both Ellen and Irma about their actions and realises that they all need a mother figure.
Vicky faces her mother's postpartum depression and their strained relationship in the study.
Reading and memorising how her grandmother read poems of Irmas making, Vicky makes rituals of forgiveness and talks with herself in the sense of magical realism where she joined forces with her companied memory of her grandmother and mother being there. She steps further into being the one to break the old structures of mothers before her, by writing down what she openly discovers.
I have various visions for this play. My primary goal is to establish a strong relationship between the three women characters in the story. I believe that silence is a powerful language, and I want to incorporate it into the play. Sounds will also play a significant role in the production. Working with the strong women in the Tollelund family, I have observed the empowerment that comes from their unconditional love and support for each other. The love they share is evident in their interactions, both verbal and nonverbal. Incorporating rituals into the performance will involve reenacting daily habits, such as drinking tea or eating together, as well as religious practices like seeking forgiveness from a divine entity. This approach will allow the characters to break free from the confines of their everyday lives through nonverbal and performative acts.
Vicky is vigorously typing away, determined to bring her story to light. She is working on a powerful draft for her book that will showcase her family's lineage and her unwavering belief in the crucial role of parenthood and the deep bond it creates between parents and their children.
Irma is a famous author, playwright, poet, activist, and feminist. Irma had Ellen with her second husband. Irma Tollelund committed suicide from an overdose of sleeping pills and passed away at the age of 63. She left her loved one's letters and all the people in the world great literature and poems.
Ellen is a poet, screen writer, author and mother to Vicky. Ellen committed suicide at the age of 55 from an overdose of morphine in the painful state of breast cancer. Ellen is the daughter of the famous author and writer, Irma. She is the mother to Vicky. She had Vicky when she was twenty with her first husband. Ellen left her daughter Vicky a journal of secrets, explaining all the dark secrets that kept her and Vicky having a mother-daughter relationship.
Vicky is the narrator of the story. She is a writer in her early thirties. She has a daughter Louise with her first husband Paul, who is from Ireland. Vicky and Paul got divorced due to Paul's drinking problem, but they remain close friends. Vicky has now found love again and is engaged to Jonathan, who is in his late thirties. Vicky is the granddaughter of Irma and the daughter of Ellen. Vicky is an only child and loves being a mother. Her family lineage includes strong-spoken female writers, authors, and feminist activists who have made their voices heard. However, according to Vicky, there hasn't been a strong sense of mother figures in the family for decades.
