Forgive Me

Aim

Forgive Me is a physical performance with live gaming. It combines pole and projection to explore the link between autism and gaming.

This project brings together Edinburgh Fringe First award winning collaborators and writers who are specialists in their fields. Written and performed by Tamsin Shasha and directed by Helen Tennison, Forgive Me follows on from the critical success of double award winning, Everything I See I Swallow (Shasha & Taylor Productions) and like that project responds directly to the challenges and turbulence of the world today.  

Working with digital pioneers BRiGHTBLACK, video mapping specialist Giles Thacker and set designer Maira Vazeou Forgive Me is a dialogue between a mother and her autistic son (represented as an avatar on screen). 

Featuring live audience interaction, gaming and pole-dancing the project explores our individual and collective need to fight monsters and why superheroes hold such a special place in the neurodiverse world. 

We have just started devising rehearsals and are using room dividers to explore our concept until the proper set is designed and constructed.

Here's a video taken during rehearsals of the mother (that's me) searching for her son Danny 

https://youtu.be/ZuaaiK_rtmI

We follow the journey of a mother as she juggles the specialist needs of her child and her parental responsibility.

all the while navigating a shifting political landscape and attempting to combat the ‘monsters’ that confront her. Her son meanwhile navigates a digital world of online gaming, hyperfixating on YouTube and Marvel heroes. 

As the two worlds converge fantasy and reality become intertwined and mother and son discover that they need every weapon in their arsenal to fight an epic battle.

Using a structure that incorporates a pole, on which the human body can suspend and invert and working with carefully chosen video projection this play is a call to action. It explores modern perceptions of neurodiversity and just how much our world is designed for the neurotypical and how much we need to change in order to make the world a better place. 

The pole becomes a means to escape from and battle against a barrage of lies and the global assault on truth.

Here's another video of me improvising some movement up the pole to help establish the mother's world;

https://youtu.be/jWE4FmSdniQ

Symbolically and metaphorically the pole becomes a physical playground to leap into a metaverse of myths and monsters that gradually takes over as the real and virtual world combine. We shall have some live audience interaction and will be using silhouettes too.

This is an Arts Council funded (GFTA) research and development project but we need to raise matched funding to fill the shortfall in the budget and to support the ambitious digital and technical aspect of the show.

This project closed unsuccessfully on 12th May 2023