JEMIMA YONG

Container

written and directed by Alan Fielden

Premiering from 2 - 12 April 2025 at New Diorama Theatre with performers Clara Potter-Sweet, Ben Kulvichit, Tim Cape, Alan Fielden and me! 

Container is a choral performance exploring the violence and tenderness of living through catastrophe. Drawing influence from Laurie Anderson’s music and Robert Ashley’s television operas, Container makes use of overlapping poetic narratives and live music to explore alternative treatments of text, voice, and storytelling. Structured yet improvised, with words and phrases iterating, converging, branching, and repeating in a cascade of images and characters, Container uses polyphony to express tenderness, overwhelm, and hysteria.

Credits for premiere at New Diorama Theatre

Writer, director & performer: Alan Fielden 

Performer Devisers: Ben Kulvichit, Clara Potter-Sweet, Jemima Yong, Tim Cape 

Musical direction: Tim Cape 

Lighting Design: Ben Kulvichit 

Sound Designer and Production Manager: Kendell Foster

Dramaturgy: Diana Damian Martin

Voice coaching: Darius Hulme

Producers: New Diorama Theatre, Kei Franklin, Jemima Yong

Reviews for Container

★★★★★ "Compelling, gorgeous, brilliantly overwhelming and soothing, Container is the most exciting production I’ve seen this year."  - London Theatre 1

★★★★★ "Container is an absorbing, brave and honest piece that intersects narratives about migration, violence and the “homeless, desperate, displaced”."  - Theatre and Tonic

"It excited me – thrilled me actually – to see such talent making such an eccentric and vital piece of work. I loved it." - Darker Neon

"... a consideration of what theatre is doing when it contains a number of people in a room. How is it telling stories? Why is it telling stories? Who is it telling stories to, and whose stories is it telling?  What Container offers is that hope within hopelessness, that reminder of the power to choose within a society that locates power in, indelibly associates power with, cruelty and hate. It does this not by ignoring distress, the way I, for months now, have been ignoring the news, but sitting in it, sorting through it, allowing the overwhelm and still doing what humans will do even in conditions of extreme distress: telling stories, making music and song, building connection." - Maddy Costa, Something Other

"... a lovely arrangement of words and sentences that carry the sound of falling rain; it is hypnotic, with a Philip Glass-like quality, and the act of listening becomes visceral and active in the auditorium... At its most powerful it is electric... At 75 minutes, the show encompasses so much that you walk away knowing what you have seen is important but overwhelmed and uncertain too. Perhaps that is the point." - Arifa Akbar, The Guardian

Links 

Previous shows 

I've been a performer-deviser on various iterations of Container with my long term collaborator Alan. Here are a list of occasions where I've had the pleasure of working on this project:

  • R&D at Hilltop Residency followed by a reading at Something Other Live at Live Art Development Agency with Alan Fielden, March 2020 
  • R&D at Cannonwharf with Nikhil Vyas, Louisa Doyle, Trevor White and Amy McCauley, August 2021
  • Performance at An Incomplete A to Z for Art & Poetry at Mahler & Lewitt Studios with Amy McCauley and Alan Fielden, February 2022
  • R&D at NDT BROADGATE with Amy McCauley, Ben Kulvichit, Nat Norland, Nicholas Worrall, Melanie Pappenheim, Tara Fatehi and Chris Brett Bailey October 2022
  • R&D at London Performance Studios with Ben Kulvichit, Clara Potter-Sweet, Nat Norland, Amy McCauley, Imogen Sage, Sammy Metcalfe, April 2022 
  • Performance at From the Lips to the Moon with Alan Fielden and Tim Cape with music by Pouya Ehsaei, Sam Warner and Marcos Santana, July 2023
  • R&D at University of Greenwich followed by work-in-progress performance at Camden People's Theatre with Ben Kulvichit, Clara Potter Sweet, Nat Norland, Tim Cape, Alan Fielden, September 2023
  • Live sharing and broadcast on rtm.fm of some adjacent sonic experiments in text at TACO! as part of their blurt programme, July 2024


Using Format