Wordsmithery*
Finalist (Publishing) Kent Creative Awards 2016
Winner (Literature) Medway Culture, design and tourism awards 2015
MY MIND IS FREE ... a play by Sam Hall
... tour of London and the South East, 1-16 October 2015
... Edinburgh Festival, 7-18 August 2017
... tour of Scotland and the North, October 2018
‘If my body is enslaved still my mind is free’ Sophocles.
Wordsmithery founder Sam Hall's full-length play, MY MIND IS FREE, came to Kent in October 2015 as part of a 20-venue tour of London and the South East, supported by Arts Council England. It was also be performed at the Edinburgh Festival in 2017, supported by Awards for all Scotland.
(Photo above by Lana Vanzetta: Emma Miller, Waylon Ma, Cassandra Bond and David Sayers)
IN THE UK
Rah Rah Theatre company have produced several tours of Sam's powerful play about human trafficking from 2015-19.
"an important show" 4 stars, FemaleArts
"a compelling, thought-provoking story" Wow Kent
"This play is an important tool to raise awareness of human trafficking" ECPAT UK
"Sam Hall has a gift for taking challenging information, and at times dry statistics and turning it all into an engaging, challenging and powerful piece of theatre. This play addresses both the big picture issues of human trafficking as well as the impact on an individual life." Merton Against Trafficking
"Each of the four human trafficking stories were also well researched and rang so true, so close to the cases we come across." Anti-Slavery International
The play tells the story of four people who find themselves in a place they do not quite understand and in a situation not of their choosing. You can buy a limited edition playscript of the play from Wordsmithery.
Read the press release for the first run.
AMERICAN PREMIERE IN HOUSTON
Mildred's Umbrella Theater Company in Texas have also used the play in their outreach work in 2019.
"When we started tossing around ideas for our outreach program, we wanted to find ways that our art could help others. Since we aren't a service organization, we thought we could use theatre, in the form of staged readings, to help local service organizations talk about their focus in a way that is more narrative and appeals to the emotions of audiences. We've seen the impact that storytelling can have around an issue and felt creating a program centered on this idea was a unique way to collaborate with other organizations and reach new audiences.
We had worked with United Against Human Trafficking before and leveraged that relationship for our first outreach project, the only issue was finding the right play to perform. We wanted a piece that told the human trafficking story from a variety of perspectives, while at the same time not fetishizing the victims or centering the issue of sex trafficking. Sam's play, MY MIND IS FREE, was a perfect fit for what we wanted to accomplish. It interwove the stories of four victims of trafficking and artfully expressed the variety in exploitation, as well as the similarities in their experiences.
We were thrilled to bring this play to Houston, which is a major hub for human trafficking in the U.S., and absolutely ecstatic that Sam could translate it to fit the circumstances and idiosyncrasies of our location so it would be relatable to our audiences."
Nominated for the Human Trafficking Foundation’s Anti-Slavery Day media awards 2016
