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The new Artistic Director of Tiata Fahodzi, Natalie Ibu, pays tribute to those who have helped her career.

Photo of Natalie Ibu
Photo: 
Robert Day

Nene Ibu

Forgive me my sentimental start, but I often think about how I came to be here now, doing what I do in the way that I do it and – sometimes in my darkest, fleeting, moments – why on earth I’m not doing something else. The answer to both starts with my mother, who was the first person to believe in me, trust that I knew what I wanted and that I could make a career out of this – relatively naïve – impulse, which career advisors didn’t really know what to do with. Sometimes I blame her for not adhering to the immigrant stereotype – what about Law, Natalie? Medicine? – and not interrogating my 17 year old self more. If she had, she’d have known that I didn’t really know what a ‘director’ did, never mind an artistic director, but I knew – somehow – that that’s who I wanted to be, what I wanted to do. Mostly, I celebrate her practical, hard-working, courageous, feminist (without claiming the word) immigrant, single-parent self for enabling me to start this journey, a journey fuelled by the rest of the people on this list and beyond.

Traverse Theatre

Can a building be a guru? Well this one was. I’ve been very lucky to have learnt my craft inside buildings and organisations, and the Traverse was the first theatre I knew. It was the first theatre that felt like home. An Edinburgh local, I grew up attending the Traverse with my secondary school drama class, writing angsty – not very good – plays as part of the Traverse Young Writers Group and hovering around the bar, longing to cross the threshold at the end of the corridor. I did cross the threshold, as Marketing and Press Assistant at the start of my career and again in 2010, when I returned to direct the world premiere of ‘Soup’ by Ella Hickson. It’s because of the Traverse that I’m a new writing director today. Perhaps, even, that I am a director at all.

Jeremy Raison

After university, after my first residency as a Trainee Director at New Perspectives, a crisis in confidence and a couple of arts management jobs in Scotland, Jeremy Raison – then Artistic Director of the Citizens Theatre – was the first person to teach me that everyone has the right to ask and everyone has the right to say no, but sometimes they say yes. And he did. I learnt that just because an opportunity doesn’t currently exist doesn’t mean you can’t create one and that relationships are everything in this business. In hindsight, both those things define, for me, producing.

I worked with Jeremy as his Assistant Director on a couple of shows, but what was most transformative about my time there was an injection of confidence, a commitment to taking control of my own professional development and liberating myself from the fallacy that talent is “discovered”. I fell in love with my own practice after my time at the Citizens, a short-term residency at Contact and the creation of a scrappy theatre company that brought emerging artists together to create opportunities to develop each other – through the doing. I insist that it’s because of this new found sass and swagger that I then won a year’s residency at the Royal Court on the RYTDS scheme in 2008.

debbie tucker green

I adore debbie’s work. I don’t know her very well – we’d snatch conversations in the Royal Court’s offices whilst I was drowning in research and she was checking her emails – but I admire her strength of voice, clarity of vision and how uncompromising she is about work. For me, her voice is so felt – it gets inside your bones – and she’s particular and visionary about how her voice is heard, how it’s marketed. Such attention to detail.

Andrew Neiman (Whiplash)

Admittedly Andrew is a fictional character and I only spent 106 – very anxious – minutes in his company, but I can’t stop thinking about him. It’s a brilliant film for many reasons, but what’s stayed with me is a question about practice over practise. I was exhilarated by this portrait of the human potential for change and my own capacity for improvement and transformation. I left promising to be as concerned with practise as I am with practice until the moment I stop working.

Dominic Cooke

I don’t think there’s one person who has worked with Dominic Cooke who doesn’t identify as a fangirl/boy. In 2008/9 he was the busiest artist I knew, and under the most pressure, and yet he was also the most humble, most accessible and most generous artist I knew. I take his curiosity, his attention to detail, his prioritising of questions over answers into everything I do – inside and outside of the rehearsal room. Gosh, even I’m blushing.

… And artists everywhere

All those artists – established, emerging or early – I meet daily, simply brave enough to call themselves a director, writer, designer or actor, you’re my gurus in little and large ways.

Natalie Ibu is Artistic Director of Tiata Fahodzi.
www.tiatafahodzi.com

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Photo of Natalie Ibu