An Interview with Rebeka Dio (Issue 10)

Rebeka: TRANSIT started off as a graduate company during the pandemic. The idea of our first piece came from the brilliant mind of Tatenda Naomi Matsvai. As friends with shared values and training but different backgrounds, we were united by the need to explore heritage, immigration and queerness. The company name came from the title of the show, TRANSIT, a story of moving across borders and finding ourselves in this strange mythical land that we call Britain. I think there was something about being stuck in our homes during the pandemic that made the need to create a piece about free movement ever more pressing. There was a feeling of trying to find out where we belong and how our

understanding of gender, sexuality & heritage can exist together. Our exploration led us to finding community within each other and with a collective of people who all share the same feeling of ‘not belonging’. I think there is a reason we all ended up in London, a city that I will defend to no end, which is where the show was set. It’s a city full of people who fall through the gaps and find themselves in this beautiful liminal space of not belonging together.

Rebeka: I think joy is such a powerful tool to engage with issues that otherwise might feel inaccessible. We always strive to make work for the communities that we represent on stage, and sometimes that means these people have gone through or are still going through immense trauma. We want to focus on the joyous moments that come with being queer, that comes with immigration, that comes from growing up in poverty, because we deserve

happiness. 

Coming from Eastern Europe, we have countless adaptations & plays that depict our suffering from WWII to the communist regime and many other forms of oppression we have faced. These are all valid and extremely important to remember, but we have other stories to tell too. We need a reminder of why we keep living. We like to finish all our shows with a dance house where the audience & actors come together to learn a Hungarian traditional dance to live music. The absolute exhilaration I see on people’s faces reminds me why I make art. People go away feeling energised, having experienced something real together. I find joy to be the most powerful and sustainable tool to call audiences to action.

Rebeka: Heritage is not something I ever actively thought about until I moved away from Hungary and had the sudden need to establish an identity that is embedded in both my country of origin & the country I chose to come to. It was when I was training in Poland with a group made up of majority British people, taught by the Polish, that I had to go ‘hang on, who am I and who do I align myself with here?’ Despite being there only for a few months, I felt more connected to the Polish, because of our

shared history & similar cultures. Being in Eastern Europe, but not in the place I grew up in, gave me a new perspective on what a transnational Eastern European identity could look like. There is a whole debate about what Eastern Europe is or whether it is even a real category worth talking about, but I personally do believe there is something that unites the people in this region. And our existence is grossly under- and misrepresented in the UK. With Places, I needed to create something that speaks to our experiences of being Eastern European while also reclaiming our heritage through a queer lens to include people like us, who have been left out of the narrative for so long.

I have always been fascinated by folk culture, having grown up with my parents and grandmothers singing me to sleep or reciting stories. There is a beautiful archaic world that is full of ancestral knowledge and folk wisdom. Unfortunately, it’s also something that has been hijacked by nationalism and conservatism. The problem with trying to preserve folk stories exactly as they are (or more like a version of them that fits your narrative) is that they can’t evolve with each generation and young people can’t assert their own values onto them. It completely defeats the purpose of folk. 

I needed us to reclaim these stories & songs and make them reflect our own experiences, passing on the values that we feel are important to us, while also paying homage to the imagery and motifs that have been passed down through generations.

Rebeka: It was important to start the process of making this show by working with a large number of artists who all have lived experience of being Eastern European and/or queer. We conducted interviews, worked through several R&D’s, gathered audience feedback and ended up with an incredible group of theatre-makers to get to the final product (If there ever is such a thing in

theatre).

Although we wanted the show to reflect our experiences, it took several research days to find a way of working that creates a separation and protects the emotional and psychological well-being of the makers & performers. We found that using folk heroes is an incredible way of regaining control over your own narrative. Further on into the process, we let go of trying to represent ourselves as makers altogether, and let the folk tales lead us, trusting that the years of discussions over our experiences were enough to create a world that represents us truthfully.

Rebeka: Making theatre in London is both incredible and extremely hard. Resources are scarce, especially space and you have to work hard for every opportunity you get. On the other hand, London is also a place where people come to find community and belonging. You will find people from all over

the world, with all kinds of experiences and dreams, ready to make things happen. There are so many incredible artists and creatives I’ve met that have completely changed the way I view the world and my practice. We are all just scraping together the time & resources to make something meaningful, and I choose to romanticise that.

Rebeka: It’s more important than ever for artists to stay politically engaged. With the increased rise of the far-right, we want to continue making work that speaks to audiences and work as a call to action. We want to continue exploring music, folk tradition & embodied experiences and experiment further with style and site-specific projects. We recently started on a new project that is in its very early stages with an R&D and a research residency in France coming up. This new piece feels extremely relevant and brings with it exciting new collaborations and ways of working.