‘Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.’ Henry David Thoreau
Award-winning designer and Gate Associate Artist Rosie Elnile brings us Prayer, the final show in our 40th Anniversary Season.
In its original form, Prayer came from a longing to create a performance space that could hold audience and performer as equals, that could dismantle colonial story structures and engender collective acts of imagination. It came from a need to engage with the climate crisis, and Anthony Simpson Pike (Associate Director at the Gate)’s provocation that the climate crisis is also a crisis of the imagination. Prayer was not going to be a set, but an environment, filled with plants and life, a space in which we could collectively imagine something unknown, or something impossible.
Since the closure of the Gate Theatre due to Covid-19, the impossibility of the project made it’s fundamental ideas more possible. Rosie has re-imagined the ideas alongside a personal journey as an artist. It’s an unfinished offer. It’s against design as a polished finished product. It’s against perfectionism. Instead, it’s a sharing of thoughts about set design.
Prayer has grown into an online interactive sharing, a look at the process, and the thinking, behind the concept.
Prayer is about making something communal and hopeful, about creating a space that needs to be cared for, a space to imagine new futures.
On Thursday 20th August, we hosted the Gate Late: The Politics of Space and Theatre Design with Rosie Elnile, where Rosie discussed Prayer, with Associate Director, Anthony Simpson-Pike.