The TEAM and Greyscale's Selma Dimitrijevic discuss the atmosphere and the mix at Almeida Festival with Naima Khan.
Almeida Festival 2012 is nothing if not a collection of brilliant oddities and I hope Greyscale's Selma Dimitrijevic won't mind me saying she's one of the most alluring ones. Her new production, Gods Are Fallen And All Safety Gone, is one of the highlights of the rather ridonkulous line-up and that's not a word I'd use too frequently in relation to the Almeida (it's not a word I use frequently at all). But as we sit in one of the theatres hidden rooms behind shelves of beautifully bound, musty books, she makes a point of how different the Almeida Festival is from the theatre's usual programme and the benefits that difference brings to both artists and audiences. “It is,” she explains, “an opportunity for them to get to know us and especially for us to get to know them”.
Her brilliantly titled, if difficult to describe show is accompanied by the likes of spoken word artist Inua Ellams, stand-out theatre company Inspector Sands – the people behind If That's All There Is – and American company The TEAM (Theatre of the Emerging American Moment). Their show RoosevElvis is, like Gods Are Fallen, in that happy almost finished stage. “It is complete” says Selma of her own show, “but I'm open to suggestions, I want to see how people react. But this isn't a work-in-progress, it's difficult to define. I'm happy with it the way it is, but I'm listening.”
This explains why her word “introduce” is so key to what The Almeida is trying to do. They're not presenting work exactly, it would be odd to call this a 'showcase' the way we do with so many other festivals. This particular gathering of artists is about meeting you, the audience. As with the most effective places for discussion, the open heart of Almeida Festival should be most evident in the tone of the next 26 days.
It is something The TEAM noticed when they were here in 2009 with their show Mission Drift. “The Almeida Festival audience is savvy,” they say, “and - we found last time - super engaged with the world around them and open to new theatrical forms.” This is fitting since both RoosevElvis and Gods Are Fallen experiment with non-naturalistic ways of looking at people and the creators of both shows approach the festival with questions about the relationships between the characters that they're exploring.
“In RoosevElvis” say The TEAM, “two women play iconic American men (Elvis Presley and Teddy Roosevelt” and their questions are about how these two men engage with each other. Similarly, in Selma's show Gods Are Fallen... two men play a mother and daughter. If you're familiar with Greyscale, you'll know the performers Sean Campion and Scott Turnbull. “They seem to make us forget that they are men,” says Selma, “they don't have anything fixed, they don't try and provide an intellectual explanation for anything.” .jpg)
The mother and daughter they play are equally not that keen on providing an explanation for anything. They meet on four occasions during the show, each time is a Sunday but it's unclear how much time has passed between meetings. Their dialogue reflects a take on the Steinbeck quote from which the show takes its name:
“When a child first catches adults out...his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter...It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine.”
“There's that moment of realisation you have as a child,” says Selma, “which is different to other realisations you have about your parents when you too are an adult. Some people are lucky to have a period they can talk to a parent as two adults. Some families don't have that because something happens and some families don't have that because it doesn't work. For me it just doesn't work. I'm 37 and when I see my dad I still snap back into being his child.”
As with The TEAM, Selma is looking for an audience to help her get a better grip on the unknown aspects of her show. The TEAM describe the feedback they received about Mission Drift in 2009 as (and I love that are happy to put it this way) “to further complicate our play”. They take their cues from what you're excited by. They want the same things most artists at Almeida Festival want “an atmosphere hungry for a live experience that is saturated, overflowing with imagery and bizarre connections”
Almeida Festival runs from 2nd until 28th July.
Images: Gods Are Fallen and All Safety Gone, RoosevElvis by The TEAM, It Needs Horses by Lost Dog and Mass Observation by Inspector Sands. 
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