The actors Nosizwe Baqwa and Cecilie Solberg Knudsrød have arrived on stage. Both are connected, via the unobtrusive headphones and microphones they’re wearing, to two unseen “encounterers”, members of the public they have been paired with for the purpose of tonight’s show. At the Showbox Festival in Oslo, the encounterers were chosen through a publicly advertised selection process. As it happens, on this occasion, all four of the participants, two for each of the two festival performances, are teenagers. They have been snuck into the theatre with the help of the production staff and, barring the actor that represents them on stage and the “moderator” that is facilitating the proceedings, they will not meet anyone else involved in the performance. Their identity is known only to the show’s producer and to the two performers on stage. 

 

When the performance begins, the encounterers are both ensconced in a room of their own but connected to the action on stage via a live video and audio feed. They are never brought in front of the audience, and they do not, at any point, see or hear each other either. Contact between these invisible participants happens only through the actors on stage. During the performance, the encounterers are free to talk about anything they wish. The job of the actors is to repeat, verbatim, everything their off-stage counterparts choose to say. What the audience witnesses is a true first encounter between two complete strangers, mediated by actors. 

 

This is Encounters by The Feminist Secret Society of Helsinki (HSF). In earlier productions, Vilma Raubaitė, Austėja Vilkaitytė, Livija Krivickaitė, Milda Naudžiūnaitė, Laura Eklung-Nhaga, Sophia Wekesa, Kreeta Salminen and others have appeared as the actors on stage. So far, the work has been staged in six different venues in three different countries and in four different languages. 

 

 

 

From the beginning, the fundamental question this concept asked was this: how can we represent another person as accurately and faithfully as possible? As with all good art, this basic premise soon led to more ideas, generated more thinking and prompted more reflection. Questions like, what power dynamics are being engendered here? Who is making the choices, and what are those choices all about? Is there something all the encounters have in common? How are they different? How do people respond when they meet a stranger? Over the years, Encounters has continued to reveal its sweet and hopeful face again and again, in many different venues, involving lots of new people. It has this strange and wonderful ability to bring to us people who genuinely want to hear and be heard, work their way towards another person and seek connection with them. We have always found it important, early on in any production, to remind everyone involved that the show is not about conflict or antagonism. It’s far more interesting to witness people genuinely trying to see each other. We don’t actively avoid disagreement on stage as such, but we also don’t seek it. 

What we have also observed is that Encounters has a very particular way of bringing a whole range of social and political issues out into the open, not as controversial hot button topics but simply as something the encounterers are interested in and keen to explore. When it comes to the show’s structure, we have always been open to experimentation. In the past, we have tried giving the encounterers a topic to talk about or narrowed the discussion to a particular theme. What we’ve discovered, however, is that giving our participants completely free rein leads to dynamics appearing on stage that we ourselves find fascinating. We always select our participants through an application process. As part of that process, all applicants are given a form to fill out that asks about topics they would like to discuss. We then curate, or perhaps direct, each on-stage encounter by pairing up people that we think will have lots to talk about. 

 

Fairly soon after Encounters first premiered, we started to think about how the show might fare in another country and a different cultural context. What would our Swedish encounterers end up talking about? What would happen in China or in Brazil? When we were preparing for a run at Helsinki City Theatre with a cast and crew many of whom were not HSF members, we realised that it actually worked really well. It would clearly be possible, and exciting too, to turn Encounters into a touring production that would be adapted for each new location with the support of an initial workshop. We had previously received really useful advise from Hyde Hytti at TINFO, so once our sights were set on these new international opportunities, we decided to get back in touch with him. 

 

 

 

Our first international appearance, thanks to TINFO’s support, came at the Sirenos Festival in Vilnius in 2023. We ran a two-week workshop in the spring and the performances, involving a total of four actors, followed that autumn. In Oslo, due to the financial realities involved, we shortened the workshop to five days, and the show itself ran with a team of two actors and one “moderator”, which we found worked very well. 

Our decision to shave a few days off the workshop prompted us to ask the same questions our colleagues in this industry are often confronted with too. If you have no choice but to cut something, what will it be? And why is it that the “something” often seems to involve all the incredibly important supporting activities that are not directly related to rehearsal or performance as such, like opportunities for the cast and crew to get together and gel as professionals? Is an artwork ever really about the end result? The process, surely, is the thing? So how much is it possible to cut from that process? Running the workshops over two weeks meant that we were able to explore lots of thoughts and ideas and questions that had arisen through our work with HFS over the past decade. Ultimately, it was all about how to work together in a sustainable and feminist way. 

 

At HFS, our ethos is about collecting and disseminating know-how. Much of our existence focuses on the issue of what feminism means in the creative context. Touring with a conceptual work like Encounters meant much more to us than just the opportunity to notch up a few more premieres for our show. Working with new people has been a chance for us to keep learning. It has also been interesting to discover where different societies are at with navigating and debating certain issues and how theatre professionals in other countries work. Our own working methods are constantly evolving in response to these experiences. 

 

 

 

Encounters really comes into its own when it’s delivered as a series of performances. Every encounter is different, and it has been exciting to witness, again and again, the kind of dialogue that takes place between individual shows. We hope for a minimum two-show run at each venue and would like to make it possible for audiences to attend more than one performance. 

 

A show like Encounters, and touring with it especially, allow us to build professional networks where feminist and non-hierarchical working practices, questions and know-how are shared between practitioners and groups in a process of continual learning and development. We’re confident that Encounters will be the start of many important conversations. As this is a show that comes together in the moment of performance on stage and is not confined to any one topic or issue, it will always remain relevant. 

 

Authors: Amanda Palo and Olga Palo  

 

 

 

  

 

The Portable Sharing project was funded by Nordic Culture Point.   

 

  

 

 

 

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