Rahel Miteku
Contortionist and Choreographer
Graduate of the New International Performing Arts Institute (NIPAI) - The Director and Play
"This program transformed the way I think about directing. It taught me how to develop a clear directorial methodology, build a strong artistic vision, and approach a play with much deeper analysis.."
Where Rahel started
Rahel Miteku has spent more than twenty years working in a language without words.
She began training at the age of eight with Ethio Selam Circus in Addis Ababa and later studied contortion with the Mongolian coach Tsendy Erdenasho. Her performing career has taken her to more than twenty countries with productions including Africa! Africa!, The House of Dancing Water, Flic Flac, Cirque Krone and UniverSoul Circus. She is Co-Founder and Executive Director of African Dream Circus, where she trains young Ethiopian artists.
Circus builds an act around what the body can do. A play starts somewhere else: with a text, its events, and the reasons a character acts. Rahel came to The Director and the Play to work from that side - to read a script the way a director reads it, and to arrive in the rehearsal room with decisions rather than impressions.
How the work went
The programme runs for three months at a distance. Each week brings a focus, a practical assignment applied to one play of the student's choice, and individual written feedback from a tutor. Rahel chose Euripides' Medea and stayed with it for all twelve weeks.
The sequence moves from reading and stage directions to structure, then to theme and supertask, given circumstances, character through-lines, and finally to rhythm, composition and staging. Nothing is submitted as an essay. Each week produced a working document: an annotated page of the script, a map of events, a ground plan, a score of actions.
The demanding part was the standard applied to every observation - that it has to become a decision someone can rehearse. An idea about a character had to arrive as an action, a position on stage, a change of tempo. Work returned with questions rather than corrections, and the following week began from those questions.
What Rahel took away
She finished the course with a Director's Toolkit for Medea: an annotated script, a map of the play's key events and turning points, a character analysis built on objectives and through-lines, a directorial concept she can state in a sentence, and a director's workbook that holds the whole preparation in one document.
Two of those materials come from her own discipline. She built a vocabulary of named movement qualities that turns a character's trajectory into instructions a performer can act on, and she worked out the rhythm of the play as a drawing before she described it in words - two lines crossing at the point where power moves from one character to the other.
The method is portable. It applies to the next play as it applied to this one, and she can use it without a tutor beside her.
Working on Medea and receiving detailed feedback throughout the course helped me grow both creatively and professionally.
FROM THE VIDEO
Rahel Miteku
Ethiopian contortionist, choreographer, trainer and arts leader with over twenty years in the international circus industry, performing on stage as Rich Miteku. Winner of the Golden Dragon Award at the Puyang International Acrobatic Art Festival (China, 2018) and holder of the Ethiopian Ministry of Culture Gold Medal Honor (2021). Co-Founder and Executive Director of African Dream Circus.
If you'd like to collaborate, commission, or simply exchange ideas, Rahel is happy to connect.
