Gate Theatre Announces PRAYER by Rosie Elnile, an Online Interactive Sharing

Award-winning designer and Gate Associate Artist Rosie Elnile brings us Prayer, an online interactive sharing, as part of the venue's 40th Anniversary Season.

In its original form, Prayer came from a longing to create a performance space that could hold audience and performer as equals, that could dismantle colonial story structures and engender collective acts of imagination.

It came from a need to engage with the climate crisis, and Anthony Simpson Pike (Associate Director at the Gate)'s provocation that the climate crisis is also a crisis of the imagination.

Prayer was not going to be a set, but an environment, filled with plants and life, a space in which we could collectively imagine something unknown, or something impossible.

Since the closure of The Gate Theatre due to Covid-19, the impossibility of the project made it's fundamental ideas more possible.

Rosie has re-imagined the ideas alongside a personal journey as an artist. It's an unfinished offer. It's against design as a polished finished product. It's against perfectionism.

Instead, it's a sharing of thoughts about set design.

Rosie Elnile said 'We imagined that instead of making a show in the Gate we would plant a garden - and that somehow by doing this we would make the Gate feel and act like a piece of common land. - what is the difference between an arts council funded building a piece of common land? The fact that the plants would operate in such a different way to the kinds of materials that we normally use to build set spawned a load of questions about how we design shows. The plants would need to be looked after - how amazing would it be to make a space that needed real care, from the audience, from the actors, from the creative team. What if for the 6 weeks that it normally takes us to make a show we all acted as gardeners?'

Prayer has grown into an online interactive sharing, a look at the process and the thinking behind the concept.

We will not be inviting critics to review this sharing but we would be happy if you would like to write about the idea informally.

Prayer is about making something communal and hopeful, about creating a space that needs to be cared for, a space to imagine new futures.

Tickets available from www.gatetheatre.co.uk. Tickets are £5, but please consider donating more if you are able.

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