A new outdoor production is opening outside Contact Theatre’s newly refurbished building on Oxford Road.
A Home For Grief begins outside the building, with the audience (individually) embarking on a journey across the neighbouring streets and urban spaces. Whilst exploring the areas audience members will listen to the voices of women expressing their very personal stories of grief, loss and renewal through headphones.
A Home For Grief runs from 29 to 31 July and is the culmination of more than four years of work for artist Fabiola Santana. Fabiola Santana experienced profound loss at a very young age and has spent recent years meeting, collecting and recording stories of grief from women in the North West. In doing so she has been reaching out and asking, “How do you do it? Can we sit together a moment and share our stories? Can we find ways to heal together?”
Audiences are invited to bring their phones and their own headphones to Contact – where they will be given instructions on how to download the sound-walk directly onto their own phones through app partner GoJauntly. They will then be able to embark individually and at staggered times on the Sound Walk taking a pre-determined route along which they will listen to Santana’s stirring and soothing voice recollecting these tales of sorrow and survival.
The route will end back at Contact where audiences are invited inside to spend time gathering their thoughts and be the first to experience a preview of a new strand of the project: An accompanying installation featuring five quilted maps that chart the different landscapes of grief which we find inside ourselves.
This production is part of Contact theatre’s summer season in the run and build-up to Contact’s reopening in September.