Profile on: Pamela Carter
'I am a theatre maker. In a directing role, I devise work with performers and collaborators; I write text for performance; I direct text-based work, and I work in education with performing arts students. I founded and manage my own Glasgow-based theatre company ek. Although I have been involved in professional theatre for the last eight years I have spent most of that time supporting the work of other artists and only recently begun to find and explore my own voice and vision as an artist.
| For me, the performance event is an ethical activity; a complex negotiation of cultural/theatrical forms, in which all participants are producers as much as consumers. In my work, I aim to examine theatrical form in relationship to how it represents the world and what it means to do so. |
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At present the main concerns in my work are around and about visuality and language, identity and representation. It appears to me that ‘identity’, in personal, racial and religious, national and strategic terms, is at present contested in all areas of our lives. My devised work asks how we take our place in the world, what is gained and lost in the process and what happens in the gap between how we feel on the inside and what we appear to be to others ‘on the outside’.
Theoretical and practical research is vital for me in developing new work. Exploration and testing, review and reflection are an important part of my process. So far, I have thought of ‘product’ in the terms of an on-going conversation with audiences, with collaborating artists and with theatre itself'.
Artistic Director of performance company ek
| ek was founded in 2002 to produce new work for theatre. Pamela devised and directed the company’s first production Soul Pilots, a Tramway Dark Lights Commission, which was presented in February 2004. In November 2004 she directed ek’s second production Habitats by French playwright Philippe Minyana at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow. |
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Pamela is currently researching a new performance Plain Speaking. This is a Tramway Dark Lights Commission and supported by Scottish Arts Council Project Funding. It will be first presented as a work-in-progress in November 2005 at Tramway in Glasgow.
Plain Speaking is about power, language and representation, and takes place on and around a huge table at which actors and audience are sat together. The actors are there to win the audience over, to persuade them that the unthinkable and unpalatable are possible, true and just; taking lessons and borrowing moves from key-note speech makers of recent history.
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She is also co-writing a play with Croatian writer Selma Dimitrijevic inspired by mathematics and game theory in particular. The play will be presented in a rehearsed reading at Stellar Quines' Rehearsal Room in October 2005. This project's support includes a playwriting commission from the Scottish Arts Council. |
Other current work
Pamela's other work includes devising and directing a show with students at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. Unaccustomed As I Am… will be presented at The Arches 20 - 22 June 2005.
In August, she will begin working as Dramaturg with dancer/choreographer Ben Wright on his new production Dark Matter.
Pamela's past work has included:
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