Breathing Out
Saturday 10th December 2016 - 7:30pm
Tickets £5.00 to £10.00. Event and booking info available here
Rich Mix, 35-47 Bethnal Green Road, London E1 6LA
www.richmix.org.uk ¦ www.numbi.org
Baddiya a play by Fatuma Khaireh, about life after refugeehood, the psychic toll of separation and the struggle to rebuild.
Hodan and Abukar are Somali siblings in their late teens and early twenties respectively. They arrived in London as unaccompanied minors, having survived the perilous journey into Europe they were moved from relatives and into foster care. They live a hard and precarious life the heart of the East End.
Abukar feels a deep connection with his relatives back home and dreams of being reunited with his mother in London. He drops out of university for full time work in order to get her a Visa. Hodan meanwhile is determined to keep her family at arms length feeling a deep resentment towards them for humiliations she has suffered in the UK immigration and care system. Things begin to change when Abukar discovers a picture of his grandfather and the alternate life he led as a seaman in London.
Fatuma Khaireh is a playwright and contributor to OOMK Zine and a research associate and resident artist at Numbi Arts. Her short plays have been performed at Oval House, Lyric Hammersmith, and Theatre 503. Her play Baddiya was also performed as part of the I Am Your Neighbour Festival in Brixton.
Actors : Asatira Adam and Zack X
"My artistic practice consists of thinking about people I come across in everyday life and image how they would react to difficult life events. It is really easy to talk about social issues in an abstract way that doesn’t speak to the human impact. For me people come first when it comes to any narrative that I write so I never set out to write anything in particular but through the process of writing the themes of the play emerge." Fatuma Khaireh