Rachel Snider is a performer, writer and director who works across theatre and live art. After completing her university degree Rachel moved to Paris to train at the Jacques LeCoq Theatre School. In 2006 she formed Rififi Theatre Company where she worked with an ensemble of actors devising and directing a range of theatre productions including The Alice Project and Lulu. Most recently she has created and performed her solo show Camellia and the Rabbit. Performances include Artsadmin, the Belfast Festival at Queens in Ireland and in March 2013 the work will be presented at the South Banks' Woman of the World Festival.
Rachel's work is drawn from a playfully eclectic array of performative and aesthetic traditions which are dramaturgically woven together to create intimate and immersive experiences for audiences through story telling, theatrical devices and the absurd &/or hyper real. Rachel's work employs a poetical, comical style of text, her own biography, costumes, props, movement and music along with a highly specific and complex visual iconography. Her aim is to create performance that is dream like - incorporating as it does the surreal, clown antics and an interrogation of the every day. Rachel has also worked with many artists and theatre companies in the UK including Bobby Baker, David Cronenberg and Robert Wilson at the Watermill centre.
A daughter discovers a shoe box filled with her mother's treasured cardboard doll and her array of historical cut out costumes...
In Dressing for Breakfast, Joan of Arc, A Deep Sea Explorer, and Marie Antoinette are brought to life by performer Rachel Snider and costume designer Petra Storrs in an autobiographical piece exploring historical fantasies, the dance of lobsters and contemporary dressing rituals.
The Alice Project was Rififi Theatre Company's inaugural production. It was written by Rachel Snider and devised with the company based on Lewis Carrol's classic book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. It was directed by Rachel Snider and Fiona Morrell and Produced by Strawberry Vale Productions. The piece was developed through scratch nights at Battersea Arts Centre and performed at Camden People's Theatre.
If you would like to get in touch with Rachel Snider or book Rachel for a show please email:
It is the elixir of the Gods.
It has stirred wars, created vast fortunes and advanced medical science.
It is at it's prime in the afternoon.
It has infused women's liberation.
And it can always be relied upon in a crisis.
It is Camellia Sinensis and it has rescued a rabbit, charmed a magician and saved Rachel's life.
A true story seen through the gauze of an Assam tea bag, that most reliable of teas.
credits:
Conceived and Performed by Rachel Snider
Dramaturgy by Polona Baloh Brown
Costumes and props designed and made by Petra Storrs
Production Manager Che Kevlin
Photographs by Becky Palmer
Makeup by Monica Storrs
Lulu was Rachel Snider's adaptation of Wedekind's Lulu cycle. The production was heavily influenced by Weimer Cabaret, the films of Fassbinder and Pabst and was set in a toy theatre complete with a roller skating countess, a haunted chanteuse watched over by a parliament of owls, a dancing unicorn and a tawdry vaudevillian cast playing a dizzying array of roles. The production had several incarnations: it was developed at Theatre 503, produced at The Hackney Empire Studio Theatre 2009, and presented at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2010.
"It is nearly midnight in a deconsecrated Victorian Chapel of ease, and there's a lesbian countess with a giant bluebird hat, seducing a man in a polar-bear suit ... Expect top-hatted villains, licking up of blood, suicide, prostitution, lesbo-masochism, blackmail ... and a Germani death-wish ("One of these days I'd like to be murdered" says Lulu brightly). What Snider does offer is a marvellous chanteuse in Wendy Bevan and a curiously beguiling Lulu ... she is a consummate evoker of mood."
– Libby Purves, The Times
Photographs by Wendy Bevan
Toy Theatre and Puppet
Set made and designed by Heidi Smith
Lulu in her Pi–ata hat
Daphne Millefoa
Owl
Hannah Smith
Owl mask made by Heidi Smith
Dancing
Julie Rose Bower and Daphne Millefoa
Music
Rabbit and Unicorn mask made by Heidi Smith
Schon
Ian David Holmes
The Countess Geschwitz
Julie Rose Bower
Chanteuse
Wendy Bevan
Wild is the Wind
Wendy Bevan
Unicorn
Ian David Holmes
What becomes of the broken hearted?
Daphne Millefoa
Broken heart made by Heidi Smith
Polar Bear
Seiriol Davies
The solar system
Julie Rose Bower, Seiriol Davies, Daphne Millefoa and Culum Simpson
The solar system made by Heidi Smith
Panther
Seiriol Davies
Piano
Wendy Bevan
Playing the Piano
Wendy Bevan and Julie Rose Bower
Rabbit
Rabbit Mask made by Heidi Smith
The Party
Julie Rose Bower and Daphne Millefoa
End of the Party
Julie Rose Bower and Seiriol Davies
Rachel May Snider