Blog: 2 Metres Apart with Funke Adeleke and Danusia Samal

In our second 2 Metres Apart blog, Funke Adeleke and Danusia Samal reflect on the process of making art in lockdown. 

Funke 

It has been a cathartic journey working with someone as talented as Danusia. She has been helpful, constructive and suggestive along the way. Which in turn has helped to shape the way we’ve worked.

From our first chat we talked freely about our experiences in lockdown and how we are coping.

This in turn fed into our discussion about the things we’ve missed and what we yearn to get back to once the pandemic is over.

We discussed missing live music, performing and seeing shows.

This helped to form an idea of what we would like to put into our creation. We also talked about what has been happening to us as individuals and I told Danusia about my experience of living with a new flat mate and how they are truly disrupting my life.

She helpfully suggested different ideas about how we could go about creating something by the second week. The first being a website that we could use to exhibit the work we create.

We jointly decided to call it Vibrations, as in the feelings that we’ve been going through during the lockdown, both high and low.

In the next week, I started to write different poetry which I submitted for the website.

Then Danusia, suggested that we write monologues from the perspective of the two housemates.

I wrote from the male’s perspective and she wrote from the female’s perspective.

By the fourth meeting we had both worked on the monologues, redrafting them as necessary in the previous weeks, the monologues include music and spoken word.

Currently, I am learning both monologues to record them as a video which Danusia will edit cleverly and they will be on our Vibrations website.

Working on this 2 Metres Apart project has really helped to shape the way I work and ask questions as well as think about things I wouldn’t normally think of.

It has also shown that it is quite possible to collaborate with the aid of the technology that we have available to us nowadays, so although it isn’t the ideal situation. It can work.

It has been a joy to have something to fully focus my energy on as well as material for my acting showreel which is all very exciting for the future and can’t wait to share what we’ve been working on.

Danusia

Funke and me had our first virtual ‘meeting’ in mid-May – a cathartic catch-up about our lockdown experience so far and the things we missed which Covid19 had snatched away: Theatre, nights out, live events. We’re both actresses and singers. We’d both performed in bands and although the previous year had brought less music to our lives, we both missed live music, singing, and being part of an audience.

You’d think it might be depressing to talk about this, but actually it became an interesting discussion on how we could regenerate that feeling, even if it was going to be a while before we performed anything live, or saw anything live.

It was in that spirit of ‘liveness’ that we let our first couple of sessions be chats about anything. Our week so far, what was annoying us… we also talked about what could we make and how we could be creative. I then compiled a list of some ideas based on what we discussed. You can see them below:

1. A collaborative webpage where we place whatever we want, images, poems, dialogue, sound, film, bits of song, all to evoke that thing we miss – live music. This webpage could be a bit like a creative journal. Or an online jazz bar?
2. We write a play/poem/story together, where we take two different roles in the conflict and tell our character’s side of it. We could record it as an audio play - I play the character you write, you play the character I write maybe?
3. We record sounds out and about and in the house and create a sound/music piece out of it.
4. If you are interested in narrative writing, perhaps you write a story, I can illustrate it? Or the other way round?
5. We make a book together of – poems, pictures, monologues.
6. We have discussions each week and write each other a monologue based on what comes out, which we record, and either edit into a film, or put on a site or just keep for us.
7. I can just write for you, a series of monologues playing all the characters you don't always get to play, especially now there is Covid. Any character you have dreamt of. You can record them and I can edit them together.
8. Or - If there’s a show you want to make/ script you want to write I can help with dramaturgy and direction and give feedback on drafts each week.

In the end we selected and merged a few of these. We created a website which could be a space to put our ideas. Then we started writing together. The piece is two sides of an argument - inspired by stories Funke told me about where she was living (don’t worry, it’s still a fictional piece!) Funke wrote a brilliant monologue from the point of view of a male flatmate and I wrote a response from the point of view of the female.

Since then, we have gone back and forth discussing and editing our pieces each week. How do they tie together? Who are the characters talking to? What is the journey? Funke is playing two very different characters with opposing perspectives on a household dispute. She is doing this brilliantly. Poetry and music will hopefully weave their way in too.

We are now at the stage of final drafts of our monologues, which Funke will rehearse, perform, and record in the next few weeks. I’m looking forward to then editing the two pieces together – using sound and music and video editing to tell this funny, familiar, and hopefully relatable lockdown story. We have both really enjoyed 2 Metres Apart and we are looking forward to sharing what we have made.

Read our other 2 Metres Apart blogs:
Lucy Edkins and Sonya Hale
Nicole Hall and Katherine Chandler