Theatr Genedlaethol Cymru Presents TIR SIR GAR in Carmarthen, Now thru April 27

In Tir Sir Gâr, A Rural Vision, artists respond to the current crisis in The Farming and food industry with a groundbreaking multimedia event. Tir Sir Gâr runs from tonight, 15 - 27 April 2013.

Leading Welsh artist Marc Rees, whose remarkable Adain Avion brought the London 2012 Festival to the heart of Wales last summer, has commissioned a group of Welsh and International Artists to respond to the current crisis in The Farming industry. Tir Sir Gâr is an extraordinary multimedia experience that combines film, promenade performance and theatrical installation to present an alternative contemporary rural vision and draw attention to the dilemmas faced by The Farming and food producing community.

Commissioned by the Welsh-language National Theatre Company Theatr Genedlaethol Cymru, Tir Sir Gâr will span across two sites in Carmarthen: St Peter's Civic Hall and Carmarthenshire County Museum in Abergwili, which houses a vast agricultural collection from the historic area surrounding Carmarthen. Audiences will weave through the museum watching a promenade theatre performance about a contemporary Welsh farming family. Along the way, six visual artists and choreographers will present their eclectic take on modern farming in the form of video installations displayed alongside the museum's agricultural collection.

The performance at the core of Tir Sir Gâr is written by Carmarthenshire playwright and screenwriter Roger Williams (writer of the BAFTA nominated Tales from Pleasure Beach, BBC 2) and directed by Lee Haven Jones (Pobol y Cwm, S4C). The cast includes Dewi Rhys Williams who won the Bafta Cymru Best Actor Award for his performance in Cymer Dy Siar, and RhIan Morgan who recently garnered acclaim for her role in Coriolan/us for National Theatre Wales. Catherine Ayers, Sion Ifan, Gwydion Rhys, Lucy Hannah, Craig Walkley and Caryl Morgan complete the cast. Tir Sir Gâr is produced by Rees' long term collaborator, Creative Producer Siân Thomas.

The play tells the story of a family forced to decide on the future of their farm following the sudden illness of their father. Will one of the children step forward to keep the family tradition alive? What is lost when people stop farming and leave the countryside? Inspired by the museum's collection, the creative team spoke extensively to local farmers and their families about farming today and the challenges they will face in the future. These conversations and the issues raised informed the play.

Along the performance route, video installations curated by Marc Rees, offer abstract responses to some of the fundamental areas of farming; livestock, labour, architecture, language and land. The films have been created by Rabab Ghazoul, Eddie Ladd, Marc Rees, James Melville, Simon Mitchell and Simon Whitehead and shot by filmmaker Simon Clode.

Rabab Ghazoul is a Cardiff based visual artist born and part raised in the Middle East. Her work explores themes of home, belonging, language and place. For Tir Sir Gâr she will explore the struggles and challenges that face the modern day farmer.

Acclaimed Welsh performer and choreographer Eddie Ladd grew up on a farm. Her work draws heavily on her rich Welsh cultural heritage and for Tir Sir Gâr she will respond to the theme of Land through enacting a traditional baptism within the landscape.

Interdisciplinary artist Marc Rees is known for his flamboyant, humorous and often extreme interpretations of history, culture and personal experience. His film will explore the theme of Architecture in agriculture via a series of rural vernacular portraits.

Movement artist Simon Whitehead creates work inspired by physical engagement with the land and the qualities of season, people and place. His film will respond to the theme of Livestock and will incorporate a 'folk dance' amongst White Park Cattle, a breed indigenous to Carmarthenshire.

Artist duo Melville Mitchell's high impact performances explore themes of machismo and camaraderie. Their piece will respond to Labour and Machinery and is inspired by Borrowed Pastures, a 1960's documentary narrated by Richard Burton about two exiled Polish soldiers struggling to survive on a derelict Carmarthenshire farm and their attempt to tame the stubborn land that surrounded them.

During their piece Melville Mitchell will build a Dutch style barn - traditional to this area of Wales. The barn will then be reconstructed inside St Peter's Civic Hall where free lunchtime talks, 'Seiat' will be given by guest speakers on the themes of Tir Sir Gâr.

Tir Sir Gâr will be performed in Welsh and is accessible to non-Welsh speakers.

Tir Sir Gâr will play St. Peters Civic Hall, 1 Nott Square, Carmarthen, Dyfed, SA31 1PG and Carmarthenshire County Museum, Abergwili, Carmarthenshire, SA31 2JG, running Monday 15th April - Saturday 20 April & Monday 22- Saturday 27 April 2013. For tickets, call 0845 226 3510 or go online: www.theatrausirgar.co.uk. Tickets: £12/£10.

CREATIVE TEAM:

Creative Director: Marc Rees
Writer: Roger Williams
Director: Lee Haven Jones
Sound Track Composer: Victoria Ashfield
Composer: Fflur Dafydd & Iwan Evans
Film Maker: Simon Clode
Lighting Design: Sergio Pessanha
Costume Design: Neil Davies
Creative Producer: Siân Thomas

Theatr Genedlaethol Cymru is the Welsh-language National Theatre of Wales. It produces a varied programme of work of wide appeal, which includes large scale tours, community projects, site specific work, and imaginative and ambitious theatrical activity throughout Wales and beyond. As well as presenting classical theatre and recognised texts, it explores new and alternative ways of presenting theatre and takes advantage of all the resources available to it to produce theatrical experiences that give its audiences opportunities to laugh, to reflect, to make new discoveries, to be challenged, to question and to celebrate. With creative partners from Wales and the UK, and with international collaborators, it constantly seeks to develop new audiences, alternative platforms and further opportunities to present its work, and strives to strengthen the role of theatre in the life of the whole nation. Theatr Genedlaethol Cymru also offers a range of participatory opportunities, which enrich the public's experience of its work and explores the relationship between the audience and the creative work itself. By way of, for example, workshops and feed-back sessions, on-line and digital activity, social networks, as well as opportunities to engage directly with and contribute towards the making of creative projects, the company strives constantly to develop its relationship with individuals, institutions and communities of all kind across Wales.

Carmarthenshire Museum has been under threat of closure. The museum is based in a house dating back to 1290 and as well as housing an extensive agricultural collection it displays mammoth bones, Stone Age axes, Roman gold, along with artwork and pottery from as recently as the 20th Century.

MARC REES: Marc Rees is an interdisciplinary creative with an established track record of delivering ground-breaking, provocative and risk taking projects. His most recent project was the spectacular Adain Avion - the flagship Welsh project for the London 2012 Festival. Marc took a mobile arts space created from the transformed body of a DC-9 aeroplane across Wales, presenting more than 150 cultural activities with over 2,600 participants, 105 artists and 83 community groups along the way. He has previously developed a number of more architecture-driven artworks; notably the location specific projects En Residencia and For Mountain, Sand & Sea, commissioned by Teatro de la Laboral and National Theatre Wales respectively. Each commission featured an array of International Artists from differing disciplines who responded to the archive, artefacts and architecture of two very different sites: a former orphanage in Gijon, Northern Spain and the entire seaside town of Barmouth in North Wales www.r-i-p-e.co.uk

RABAB GHAZOUL: Rabab Ghazoul is a visual artist interested in how we negotiate and construct ideas around the political. Her work emerges across a series of geographical counterpoints, taking the form of processed explorations of home, belonging, language, place, and the unstable texts which underpin these unsteady subjects. Part social observation and commentary, part investigation into the nature of personal affiliation and narrative, her work draws on a range of media processes to include video, site, installation, text, as well as interventions within the public realm. Her practice has sometimes found her referencing or restaging existing 'texts' - from news media footage to an existing art work - to explore our relationship to power, and the coerced and often destabilized nature of our values.

LEE HAVEN JONES: Born in Wales, Lee graduated from the University of Exeter and won the Cameron Mackintosh Foundation Scholarship to study acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. ? His work as an actor encompasses both stage and screen, and has included projects with The National Theatre, BBC, National Theatre Wales, Traverse, New York's 59E59 and S4C. Indulging his passion for film, he directed his first screen project in 2009, picking up a nomination for best documentary at the Celtic Media Festival Award. He has since directed a number of drama projects, both in English and Welsh, including several hour-long episodes of the BBC's popular Indian Doctor, gritty dramas Alys and Caerdydd, and Pobol y Cwm. He is currently shooting Casualty. As a director of Production Company Joio, he is developing a number of projects for film, theatre and television.

EDDIE LADD: Eddie Ladd was born and raised in Ceredigion. She has worked with a number of Welsh theatre companies since 1986, spending a decade performing and writing with the company Brith Gof. She began creating her own work in 1990 and has produced sixteen shows which combine dance, text, video, audio and music. She has toured extensively with her work in Wales, UK and internationally. In the late 80's and mid 90's she worked for two short periods on television presenting 'Video 9' for S4C and 'The Slate' arts magazine show on the BBC, winning the Royal Television Society award in 1996. In 2001 she won a NESTA fellowship and developed three pieces: 'stafell A', 'stafell B' and 'stafell C' between 2004 and 2006. In 2003 she won the Total Theatre Award at the Edinburgh Festival with her show 'Club Luz'.

MELVILLE MITCHELL: Melville Mitchell have been collaborating together since graduating from Howard Gardens College of Art and Design, Cardiff in 2001. They have exhibited widely in galleries, institutions and have taken part in numerous international residencies. Melville Mitchell currently both live and work in London. Utilising a range of different methods driven from a performance and action based core the works take the form of drawings, video and sculpture or are further developed into larger-scale live events. Violence and machismo are central themes developed within a broader context that seek to further understand their notion of a collaborative partnership. Often working together or pitting themselves in direct opposition, the performances are confrontational and at times painful to observe. Recent projects include Plus Arts, London; See If I Float, Cyclones collaboration, London; The Forge Tavern Incident, Bondai Beach Pavilion, Sydney, Australia; The Dallas Steak House, La Laboral, Gijon, Spain.

SÉRGIO PESSANHA: Sérgio Pessanha graduated in Architecture and Urbanism at the University of Brasilia in 1983. He has worked as Set and Lighting Designer, as well as Technical Director with many Directors and Choreographers from different countries, like EnDança, Eliana Carneiro and Maura Baiocchi (Brazil), Joao Fiadeiro, Angela Guerreiro and Rui Horta (Portugal), Maria Rovira and EL TEATRO FRONTERIZO (Spain), Alvaro Restrepo (Colombia), Los Denmedium and Vicky Cortés (Costa Rica), Les Ballets C. de la B. (Belgium), Constanza Macras (Germany) and Saburo Teshigawara (Japan). Pessanha has taken part in over 250 International Festivals with dance and theatre productions in over 30 countries in America, Europe, Africa and Asia. He has given workshops on set lighting at a number of institutions including the University of Brasília, Estácio de Sá University (Rio de Janeiro, Brasil), Teatro José de Alencar (Fortaleza, Ceará), Kampnagel Fabrik (Hamburg, Germany), SESC (São Paulo, Brasil) and during the Internationales Sommertheater Festival Hamburg, also in Kampnagel (Hamburg, Germany). In 1991 he was awarded the 'Best Lighting Design of the Year' in New York by the New York Times. He currently lives in Germany and works all over the world.

SIÂN THOMAS: Siân Thomas has been working as Creative Producer with Marc Rees since 2006 and most recently produced the highly successful London 2012 Festival project Adain Avion. She also produced his previous major commissions at Teatro Laboral, Spain in 2009 and with National Theatre Wales in their inaugural 2009-10 season.

Her extensive history creating performance began as a founder member of Cardiff Lab Theatre in Wales in the mid 70′s and includes 12 years based in Spain as an actress and teacher with La Tartana Teatro, Madrid.

SIMON WHITEHEAD: As a movement artist, Simon's work has involved a transition from the formal presentation context of the theatre and studio space to a primary physical engagement with land and the qualities of season, people and place. His studio and context for presentation exists outside the usual art institution and interfaces directly with lived and sensory experience, usually involving a process of walking and journeying, through which an audience may participate or become witness.

His background in Dance and Movement continues to be central to the work he makes; it is the body's ecological paradigm and relation to its environment that are a basis from which he meditates and realises a series of propositions and experiences shared directly, or indirectly with an audience. This work seeks to connect humanity with nature and enliven participation on a physical and poetic level, often embracing the possibilities of technology as a bridge. His work often begins with and evolves through a series of walks. These operate as manoeuvres with clear strategies, resulting in live performance, or conducted through various means of live and recorded media.

ROGER WILLIAMS: Roger Williams writes for television and theatre. His work for TV includes the BAFTA-nominated Tales From Pleasure Beach (BBC2), Hollyoaks (C4) and Gwaith/Cartref (s4c). He won a BAFTA-Cymru Award for screenwriting for his work on the Welsh language drama series Caerdydd in 2010. He has written theatre plays for companies including Made in Wales, Sherman Cymru and the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. He is currently writing a new play for National Theatre Wales. He was writer in residence with SydneyTheatre Company and his plays have been performed in Australia, New Zealand and New York. Roger has also written radio plays for Radio 4, Radio Wales and Radio Cymru. He is currently the Chair of the Writers' Guild of Great Britain.

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