DV8 and Verbatim Theatre

DV8, in all honesty was not how I thought it was going to be at all. My preconceptions were thrown out of the window. I thought I was going to watch an 80's style DV8 Peice. Instead I was faced with a very modern, up to date piece of Verbatim theatre which fused modern music, dance, technology and the words of real peoples stories about their experiences of Homo/sexuality, culture and religion. And I thought it was fantastic.

It was how I thought Verbatim theatre should be, theatrical, factual, moving, un-nerving and showed me the stories about these particular communities. It was realistic in the sense that it wasn't one sided, it showed both sides of opinion, the religious fanatics who think Homosexual practice is wrong, and those who think it right and those who think its wrong but practice it anyway.

The fact that I knew the stories where true really helped me to connect with the action on stage, I felt emotional connections with these stories because I knew that they were fact, it was real and therefore hit me harder than a fictional story could.

It made me think about community in the sense of how we rarely see these communities, especially if you are a white, straight female such as myself. The afro-carrabian communities who are gay, forced to hide, same for muslim homosexuals who cannot truly be themselves in public due to the fact they will constantly be abused if they do.

Lloyed Newson himself describes how he and his partner at the time in the early 1990's went on a gay pride march that went through an area of Brixton that was predominantly afro-caribbean and experienced abuse

'I was struck my the fact that people who themselves are part of a minority, many of whom must have experienced racism and racist abuse first-hand, were so willing to be abusive towards another minority' (Newson, cited from the To be Straight with You programme which I shall reference properly later)

This is interesting as it shows how minorities, or small communities can still have things against each other, they can still hate what other communities do, even though their own comminity is constantly under threat.