Day: 6 April 2021

About Gabriella Gay 

Gabriella Gay is a page-stage poet and creative producer who is regularly commissioned to perform, write, organise events and facilitate workshops for a wide range of organisations. She was born in Trinidad, raised in London, but has lived in Staffordshire for over 10 years.

Gabriella has made numerous TV and radio appearances and her work features in shows, exhibitions, advertisements and official videos. She is interested in amplifying the voices of overlooked people and places.

A strong believer in the power of the spoken word she is inspired by theatre, art, photography, people and the city in which she has adopted as her home. Gabriella is a trustee of The New Vic Theatre and the Cultural Champion for Newcastle-under Lyme (2020). She explored her interest in working in unusual spaces in her recent TEDx talk (2020) at Keele University.

She is the founder of Stoke’s Roaming Poets and Kwanzaa Collective UK *. Gabriella is an associate artist at B Arts and Restoke, an arts organisation that co-creates performances and programmes in unexpected spaces. In 2019, Gabriella became the Writer in Residence of Hanley Car boot sale for six weeks.

Underlying all of Gabriella’s written, performed and socially engaged work, is the power of building stronger connections and community.

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Every Other Seat

Gabriella Gay

These seats are a show of resilience.

They behold the past,

grieve in the present,

and reimagine the stories of our future.

While theatres are empty, seats

furlough for months in the still silence,

weeping for the loss of the vibrant

richness that theatre brings to our story.

These seats mark our ability to adapt

restyle, remodel, reshape, diversify

like Shakepeare did when theatres closed

and plague killed all but his first published poem.

Our present is still ghosted by thoughts of the past

whisperings and echoes of when we shared space,

clinked glasses and queued for the loo in the interval.

We crave communal contact and grieve for time and money lost.

These seats are pointing forward and up,

They navigate the time with flexi heels,

and walk in a new understanding of friendship,

allyship, teaching, technology and discovery.

We stopped waiting, and started creating with the possibility

that grows in hard soil and survival.

A theatre is its people not its bricks,

It is costume, set, questioning and collaboration.

These seats are a reminder of our resilience.

Of bending, breaking and blending

to reimagine the stories of our art,

that will make certain the success of our future.

‘Ujima Throne’

by Gabriella Gay

Ujima is a Swahili word which means collective Work and responsibility. It refers to communities working to solve problems together. Within a community every person matters. We are stronger when we accept and honour our commitments to helping one another.

The word Theatre derives from the Greek ‘Theatron’ roughly meaning ‘a place to behold or see’. The pandemic of 2020, and the rapid sharing of information on social media forced the world to stop and see the inequalities faced by Black and Brown people. This has opened the ears of the community to listen to their stories of joy and pain.

This throne, in the round is weaved with a river of red eyes, a tree of friendship in black, brown, white and red, and maps of cornrowed hair. The unfinished chevron friendship tree at the centre is symbolic of the coming together of all races to fight systemic racism seen during protests in 2020. It is often said that enslaved Africans used cornrows on their head to map ways to freedom. Braids are used throughout the piece in contrast to the straight green lines of the chair as black hair is an expression of resilience, a passing down of cultural information, cementing of identity and a show of infinite creativity and possibility. There are strands hanging, unbraided as the fight for racial equality and justice is an old and ongoing project.

Gabriella Gay’s seat, Ujima Throne, and poem, Every Other Seat, can be seen in the store window behind the ex-Dorothy Perkins store at the Roebuck Centre, Newcastle-under-Lyme.