While training in South Africa as a classical actress, I was lucky enough to be taken under the wing of a great puppet master who provided me with an apprenticeship in puppetry for three years. I trained in marionette manipulation and construction but also learned a lot about theatre in general, while being given the opportunity to work alongside great puppeteers in the South African State Theatre.

As my training came to an end, I had a strong yearning for the green grass of England and I decided to give everything up and move. I wanted to further my training in physical theatre, become an overnight success, and show the cynics in my family what metal I was made of. I decided England was the best place to do that. I've been living in London for just over 7 years now, and things are turning out a bit differently.

I wanted to do a solo show using mime and visual theatre. A few years passed first, mainly with mundane jobs, short acting, theatre and puppetry courses, and some performing work. It's amazing how long it takes to shoot roots in a foreign country, but no-one dies from it, and it's your own choice.

An inspiration came from looking after my grandmother in South Africa, who suffered from Alzheimer's disease. I only visit my family once a year and at the time (2006), and was quite miffed at having to spend a whole week of my holiday looking after old gran who was losing it a bit. But on arrival, everything changed. My heart wrenched each time I saw her struggle to remember the simplest things. It was her eyes that got me. We were sitting on a couch inside my family's beach house, the sun and ocean bright outside. But inside the house, a fierce battle was going on. In silence my grandmother was trying to hold onto herself, hold on to her identity. I could see her pale blue eyes anxiously searching her mind, combing a dark cave for the specific memory that would make her OK.

I stared back at her struggling within this terrible experience, searching for some possible comparison. Although at a smaller level, I saw there was some relationship in my own life to her fight to hold onto her identity. Like me, she was a foreigner in a new country. Having left my home country and moved house seven times in seven years, I'd become expert in starting up a new home, a new life, a new personality. I realised that there may be some similarities, some juxtaposed situations, between the awful journey of losing your memory and trying to blend in with a foreign environment. Or so I thought at the time. I now believe that the disease is much, much more devastating than that, but it was a starting point.

I saw my grandmother again the following year. Her degeneration was unmistakable and painful to watch. But there were moments of clarity - fragments in the day when she would look and actually see you - and those are the moments that have remained.

END

(c) Marinda Botha 1 August 2008