Helen Stephens

– Performance, Friday 13th November 2009

Helen graduated from Queensland University of Technology in 2007 with a Bachelor of Creative Industries Drama. Since then she has been actively working in the youth arts industry running theatre workshops for Backbone Youth Arts and Human Ventures. In 2008 Helen co-coordinated the performance department for the 2high festival and she currently works as the Program Officer for Playlab Inc. 

Shakespeare and singing were her first true loves and she has studied classical voice and theatre since age 10. She has performed in classic plays such as Jean Anouigh’s Antigone as Antigone and also in musicals such as The Wiz as Dorothy, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat as the Narrator and Ignatian’s Musical Society’s 2009 production of Les Miserables. The 2009 2high Festival will see Helen’s first solo performance of her devised work Sweet Surrender. Helen plans to continue working in the artistic world in Brisbane and beyond as a performer, singer, teacher and director.

Sweet Surrender explores the idea of continuing memory and of what the essence of self and life is. If the self is, as some psychologists propose, essentially a memory, a series of experiences that we use to define ourselves then what happens after death? This piece follows the story of three characters as they discover what happens to memories when new ones can no longer be made. When time marches on pulling you further from the last time you touched or smiled or laughed with someone how do you continue to love them? How do they continue to exist? What happens to the memories? How does the person within a memory merge with the person watching the memory? How do you make meaning of it? How does a woman love a man she only ever knew as an adolescent? How can childish memories evolve to construct a memory more full and rounded? Is it then memory or fiction?