When Wellingtonian Ella Gilbert went to Singapore for a drama schools' conference, the last thing she expected was for it to take her to an underground theatre company in Iran.
Gilbert, now 24, befriended students from the University of Tehran after watching them perform scenes from Shakespeare's Hamlet at the conference. She says they used movement and physical theatre in a way she'd never seen and she wanted to learn more.
Returning home to finish studies at Te Kura Toi Whakaari O Aotearoa-New Zealand School of Drama, Gilbert and friend Poppy Serano started a crowdfunding campaign and, six months later, found themselves in the hurly-burly of Tehran.
"We landed in a massive city filled with people who are incredibly intellectual and political with an energy I'd never encountered before," she says of the 2016 trip. "I'm used to charging ahead but for a while there, I couldn't keep up. I think it taught me to slow down, to look at things a bit more closely but I loved it."
Gilbert and Serano spent a month working with an Iranian theatre company and attending the country's biggest theatre festival. She got to work on her solo show Soft Tissue, originally called Gaggle, before coming home and performing it on marae, in prisons and at Massey University.
