Gideon Jeph Wabvuta

Zimbabwe - Theatre & Writing

The artist

A few words about your artistic career

Gideon Jeph Wabvuta is a writer who works in theatre and television. His ultimate goal in life is to reframe and reclaim the African narrative through theatre, television and film.

How long have you been an artist?

I've been an artist since 2008. ** Why did you apply for this scholarship? How will the scholarship support you? The grant effectively allows me to do my work and create without worrying about paying my rent. It's these types of grants that allow a writer to concentrate solely on creating life-changing work.

What are your concrete artistic objectives after this residency?

To write more plays and collaborate with other creators; to create in a world where we are all locked in.

His residence

What did you achieve during this creative residency? What is the result (work created)? Who was involved in the creative process?

The most important aspect for a playwright is the ability to collaborate with actors, directors and a playwright. The fact that I was able to involve more than eight people in my project from the conception phase while I was still drawing up the play was a huge success. I had a dramaturg whose sole aim was to keep me honest about how I portrayed my characters. They regularly challenged my decisions, prompting me to think more seriously about my writing choices. Involving the actors was the ultimate joy, they got involved in the process, they challenged me, they were selfish with their characters, which helped because it made the characters I had written clear. The end result is a work in progress. In theatre, we always say that a play isn't finished until it's performed. So my play will be rewritten by different actors to feed into the process. I'm excited by the idea of being able to use this play to apply for different opportunities in the world of playwriting. The most important thing is to have the funds to pay my actors and playwright.

How do you think these activities help us to think about the world today, in relation to the COVID-19 crisis, and/or about building for the future?

This play is set in a world without Covid-19, but the creative experience has been severely undermined by the pandemic. To begin with, I'm a writer who likes to write in public spaces, the atmosphere of people talking and walking awakens my creativity. Here, I was stuck in my room, writing day and night. What's more, as a very visual writer, I'm used to entering a space and working on my play with actors, but this time I had to use Zoom. It wasn't easy because we had connection problems, even on the day of the reading we had actors coming in and out. I think that's the world we live in now, it's a virtual world and unfortunately, the further down the pyramid you are, the more difficult it becomes to access theatre or any other art form. I think the future of theatre is definitely online. There's nothing we can do about it and the fact that we're learning to use Zoom for plays is remarkable, that's where we're going, and we can't change that. I think this process has really made me aware of the inequality of wealth, of countless actors I couldn't hire because they didn't have Wi-Fi at home. Of course that has to change, we have to find ways of making things fairer.

How did you feel during the residency? And afterwards?

The process of creating the piece wasn't easy. The stress of having to abandon one's creative routines made me lose my head. What was worse was, of course, the socio-political problems of the world that we could escape by going to see a film or watching sport, but now I couldn't, I had to be indoors 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. I realised after a few weeks, when I was struggling to write, that all I had to do was create new rituals. I started taking more walks to relax, I put on music while I wrote and above all, I read a lot. This helped me to create conditions that allowed me to sit down in my room and create. The work is not at its best, but the fact that there are words on the page and that there is a recording of a reading allows me to work on the piece and make it grow. His work [(