Featured image: Ingo Solms
The Future Flares Festival brought us the dramatic performance of A Seventh Man (work-in-progress) by Pinchbeck & Smith. This immersive experience is rightly named after its muse and central influence, the 1975 book A Seventh Man by John Berger and Jean Mohr which follows the realities of migration. Filled with verbatim interviews and photography, the three actresses captivate the audience, immersing them into this re-enactment of the working immigrant’s livelihood.
Inviting audiences into the deep end, watchers are seated in two parallel lines, forming a small walkway that became an amalgamation of imagined settings. Upon being given a miniature picture of a portrait and being told to keep it safe until the end of the journey, audiences begin to form ideas about their unknown atmosphere. Enlightening audience members on their ride to a new land, the performers open the show by explaining that the audience is going to work far away from their homes and families. The abstract scene is soon dauntingly set as each audience member is passed their ‘only meal’ of bread, immersing them into the feelings of worry, fear, but ultimately a determination to make a better life for their loved ones back home.
Realities of a work day are represented through the stress of mind-numbing repetition, acting out the dull but fast-paced menial jobs migrant workers leave their whole worlds behind for. Audio and visual properties convey the message of what migrants really feel and go through, forcing this reality to the forefront of the audience’s mind. Chalkboards put identities to voices, with written details such as ‘Turkish migrant’ or ‘Italian migrant’ shown to the audience as audio interviews play.
Props carry a vital role in the immersive aspect of the performance. The crowd is given safety helmets to wear, chalkboards to hold and look at as the story unravels, and finally, pictures of the people, conditions, personal belongings and communities, with the opportunity to add them to the small ‘toy’ city centre stage.
The performance is highly emotionally evocative, imploring audience members to create the unpredictable anger and sadness that became the migrant’s lives. A climactic moment quickly arises as performers lash out with safety masks and megaphones, shouting about the plethora of injustices, detrimental health conditions and deaths inflicted upon poorly treated migrant workers. Such moments contrast the informative instruction of workers’ daily lives, providing the audience with not just accurate retellings of the migrant worker experience but the emotions, the worldview and the legacy that drives the need for such political stories to be told through performance.
Overall, A Seventh Man serves as a gritty, brutal retelling of the heartbreaking history of the unfair treatment and soulless realities for migrants. The festival as a whole is must-see event for those who wish to learn and be fully immersed in political topics of our past, present and future.
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