Same Boat Theater: The Day Everyone Decided To Stop by Max Wilkinson directed by Piyush Kumar
Same Boat Theater Collective is an environmental justice theater company based in San Francisco, USA.
The voices and images in the video are those of theater artists from the U.K., India and the U.S. All are actors and writers who participated in Same Boat’s EarthQuake 2020 – a festival of short plays, spoken word, music on environmental justice themes from worldwide voices. We performed EarthQuake online in October 2020, just in the middle of the pandemic, and decided as a special project for EarthQuake to put together a video of many of the participating creatives speaking the words to a piece called “The Day Everyone Decided to Stop” by UK writer, Max Wilkinson. The written piece covers one day in London as people stop their everyday business to experience isolation and beauty in their lives.
We decided to universalize the message of Max’s piece by having artists from around the globe give us video and sound bytes of themselves as they go about everyday life during lockdown. We consider the recent pandemic to be very much an environmental crisis as it has its roots in human encroachment upon wild areas and the disruption of the ecosystem. “The Day Everybody Decided to Stop” is a moment of reflection, a snapshot of ourselves as we experience a pause during a global crisis before moving on.
