Artist Rhiannon Faith: 'I refuse to live in a society where someone feels so alone they lose hope'

The idea for Lay Down Your Burdens grew in a few places. It started during Covid as I was thinking about my neighbours, the ones I knew lived alone, and I was wondering what was happening to all the ‘stuff’ that piles up in our minds, that we usually get off our chest by chatting to a mate, or family. When we haven’t got someone to chat to, listen, help find solutions, offer advice, make a joke to make it feel easier, where does the ‘stuff’ go?  

Then when everything returned to ‘business as usual’, we began a creative process called The Care House Project in Harlow, Essex. People came to talk about the care, or lack of care in their lives and over a long period of workshops with a group of people from the local community, writing, moving, sharing our experiences, I created a performance called 9 Acts Of Care. 

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One of the people involved in that project was Dave. Dave is brilliant, he’s super smart, political and cares an extraordinary amount for the people in Harlow and its environment. We would meet before each workshop and he would take me around the town, he is the beating heart of this place and a community touchstone. He told me how in one day he had lost his job, his home and was out on the streets. He introduced me to the charities that had supported him – Streets2Homes and Rainbow Services – and he told me about the load he had carried and how he had to navigate the stigma of poverty. I was in awe of how he was managing and his enthusiasm but what stood out was his determination to bring people in the community together. 

We invited him and eight other brilliant people from Harlow to be part of a show that we would create together. A show where, with their consent, their voices and experiences could be heard, and in turn resonate with anyone else going through a similar time. The objective was to help people feel that they are not alone. During the process they felt seen, they felt valued and they felt that they mattered. These are all essential basic needs that within our society that so often seem to be overlooked. The group performed the shows in Harlow Park during our Festival of Care, became a community in their own right, and also a little famous in Harlow!

Lay Down Your Burdens captured both of these moments in time. It is a dance theatre piece that began by visiting communities on the margins, again in Harlow, but then branching out to Restoke (Stoke-on-trent) and Oxford Playhouse (Oxford). We invited anyone that wanted to come along to talk about the burdens we carry. They would share the load they were carrying and in return we would offer a gift of art, a piece of dance, live music or poetry. We ran creative workshops, recorded people’s stories, wrote about heaviness, but also about the beautiful things we hold too. 

This led to a show which invites audiences into the community to stand in gratitude at what we are able to carry rather than in judgement, and feel connected in both our suffering and experiences of beauty. For a moment, in the theatre, we can see one another with soft eyes, not hard eyes. We set the show in a local pub, a place where you often go to chat things through, or to get something off your chest. The landlady became the bearer of the burdens, with a variety of characters each feeling weighed down in their own unique way, and in each show, the audience are included in a collective carrying of one another and our burdens. Transformations arrive, having moved through the joy and the sorrow.

Making the type of work that requires vulnerability and digging deep into our experiences, as well as being cathartic, can be an emotional slog, so we have a company psychologist Joy Griffiths who joins us in each of our projects and works alongside the company and the communities to offer support. She does group work, visualisations, needs audits, and gives us tools to use. She has one-to-ones throughout the project, and she holds our spaces with care, which allows us all to be brave. The boundaries are clear; it’s always an invitation and there will be continuous consent checks. Some like to bare all, and others like to keep things for themselves, and often I find we learn that about ourselves as we go along. These art collaborations are full of remarkable moments of self-achievement and pride. The joyous parts for me are seeing in someone grow in confidence, because you have believed in them, and encouraged them to step into new experiences. The community friendship that is built between a group of people through being vulnerable and really seeing one another, is a privilege to witness.

These communities are built through artistic creation into something that, if sustained, will continue to be a source of joy and value. But how do we do that? What does community maintenance look like? How do we demonstrate to funding bodies that it is essential, and needs greater investment? That’s what I am thinking about now, that’s my next project. For me and our company the goal is authentic belonging for all using the arts to widen opportunities and open the doors to belonging. I refuse to live in a society where someone feels so alone that they lose hope, when they have more to carry than most. That’s when we need to step in, refuse to live without them, and do whatever we can to share the weight. That weight is ours.

Lay Down Your Burdens by Rhiannon Faith premiered at the Barbican, London in November 2023 and was recently nominated for an Olivier Award for outstanding achievement in dance.