Rada Lab Works 2026: Scratch
(This is a past event and is no longer running)
An evening of short, work-in-progress presentations, Scratch Night offers audiences a rare chance to see original ideas in development before they reach the stage. Expect an eclectic mix of theatre, movement, performance and live art from RADA’s MA Theatre Lab artists as they test new concepts, experiment with form and share fresh creative voices in an open, collaborative setting.
Pieces included in this evening: The Mirrors Piece, Show me the thumka, C**T ACT, Saturn’s Return, Birds<Birds<Birds<, and Wide Awake
Each piece is presented as part of an ongoing creative process, making this a unique opportunity to witness new work at the moment it begins to take shape.
The Mirrors Piece
Created and performed by SookKuan Tang and Joshua Aiu
Shifting the narrative weight of Euripides’ The Bacchae from an ideological duel between king and god — this forced perspective immersive experience asks viewers to step into the shoes of Agave (King Pentheus’s mother) by transforming a classic political tragedy into an intimate psychological horror.
Historically, Agave spends most of the play off-stage as a reported figure of wild ecstasy, only arriving at the climax to serve as the punchline of divine vengeance. Retelling the story through her eyes attempts to reframe the entire mythology around agency, the terror of fanaticism, and maternal grief.
Content warnings: Loud sounds.
Show me the thumbka
Devised and performed by Devaki Rajendran and Ranjini Nair
Choreography and Dancer: Devaki Rajendran
Primary academic research by Ranjini Nair
Show me the thumka is a choreographic work-in-process that explores the hip as a site of sexual availability, discipline, and regulation within Indian dance cultures. The project draws on Hindi film songs that repeatedly associate the moving hip (called a thumka) with desire and excess, placing these representations in conversation with the cultivated stillness expected of the hip in Indian classical dance, and how respectability is encoded in the frozen hip. Emerging from a chapter of my doctoral thesis on the hips in Indian dance, the work asks how power operates through formal aesthetics and how choreography can expose and reimagine these embodied norms. It asks questions around desire, who is allowed to evoke it, and how the male gaze perpetuates a fantasy of the dancing woman.
C**T ACT
Devised and performed by Anna Kopacek and Lucy Mae Bean
We do what we want. Do you mind?
Content Warnings: Profane language, loud sounds, and yelling
Saturn’s Return
Created, written and performed by Rose Klekotko
Performer and dramaturgical collaborator: Tomás Barry
Movement collaborator: Aleksandra Komarnicka
Saturn’s Return is a multidisciplinary solo performance in development, combining theatre, movement, voice and multimedia.
The project began as a personal investigation into the concepts of success and failure, and the psychological threshold of turning thirty. Inspired by the astrological phenomenon known as the Saturn Return – a symbolic period associated with responsibility, endings and transformation—the work explores what happens when the version of ourselves we expected to become begins to collapse.
Julia is an actress who’s about to turn thirty. She desperately clings to an illusion she’s still 25 and is determined to prove that her dreams are still within reach before the “deadline”. As the pressure of time builds, an unseen voice begins to challenge her, exposing the fantasies and expectations she has built her identity around.
This extract captures the beginning of her confrontation with Saturn: the moment denial slowly starts to crack.
Drawing from my background in acting, movement and my long-standing practice of studying astrology, the project uses live performance, physical theatre, music and an off-stage voice to investigate how these internalised beliefs become embodied. Rather than approaching astrology as a belief system, I use it as a dramaturgical framework through which to explore identity, social pressure, ambition, burnout and the transition into adulthood from a female perspective.
This 13-minute scratch presents the opening chapter of the work. We meet the protagonist before the transformation begins, at the moment when the identity she has spent years performing starts to slowly unravel. The scratch focuses on establishing the theatrical language of the project and the relationship between the performer, the audience and Saturn’s voice.
Birds<Birds<Birds<
Created and performed by Patti West
“Birds have been on this planet since Archaeopteryx, a hundred and forty million years ago. Doesn’t it seem odd that they’d wait all that time to start a war against humanity?” — Mrs. Bundy, The Birds, dir. A Hitchcock
One woman. One impossible director. Many uncooperative birds.
She was hired to train them. The deadline is impossible, Hitchcock won’t leave her alone, and the birds… the birds answer to no one.
Something is about to break. It might be her. It might be the world.
WIDE AWAKE
Created and Performed by Helen Percival and Genevieve Labuschagne
Wide Awake is a physical theatre work in progress, exploring how emotions affect the body and that if they are left unexplored, have the power to direct the course of our lives.
The piece revolves around a person’s exploration of a particular emotion and how it has shaped the course of their life.
Wide Awake is an experimental theatre piece blending movement and storytelling, inspired by the ground-breaking book ‘The Body Keeps the Score’ by Bessel van der Kolk, which explores the mind body connection and how trauma is stored in the body,
As physical theatre performers, we’re fascinated by how we store emotion in our bodies and the ways it can be unlocked through movement. Wide Awake is an exploration of this reflection, blending storytelling, poetry and movement, delving into how our words impact the body and how the body impacts our words.