Some Things the Script Never Said, But I Found Anyway

By: Rodney Gariseb, Playwright & Director – Naked Spaces

When I finished writing Naked Spaces, I thought I understood it. I’d lived inside those words for months. But once the rehearsal process began, I realised the play was merely a map. The room itself, with its sweat, stillness, and accidental discoveries,was the terrain. And that’s where the script began to dissolve into something far more alive.

The dance rehearsal room feels like a kind of homecoming for Naked Spaces. Its muted pastels of blue and green, the very colours of our production, seem to cradle the work, as though the play has returned to where it was always meant to unfold. Square mirrors line the walls, catching fragments of movement, reflection, and self-discovery, while the air carries that familiar woody, library-like scent of something lived-in and quietly sacred. During our first week, a small bird appeared, darting up and down, left and right along the high ceiling, as if rehearsing alongside us. We haven’t seen it since, but somehow its brief presence made sense. A flicker of spirit and mischief, perhaps even a metaphor for The Spook itself: always there, just at the edge of vision, reminding us that even the rehearsal room can be haunted in the most beautiful way.

Theatre is where the myth of the Individual goes to die a natural death. It’s a privilege, and sometimes a quiet heartbreak, to witness actors like Mukendu Ndjavera (Sem) and Odile Gertze (Aili) construct entire psychologies that never made it onto the page. One afternoon, they found themselves in a long, unscripted silence. I was about to cut in, but the air shifted. Mukendu’s jaw tightened, Odile’s breath faltered and suddenly the silence was the scene. It held the residue of a thousand arguments and one unspoken apology. That moment rewrote what I thought I’d written.

With Michael Nakale (Younger Sem) and Jeanne-Danae Januarie (Young Aili), the discoveries were kinetic. During a heated exchange, JD let out a nervous laugh, real, unplanned. Michael froze, then met her gaze with something tender and devastated. The room stopped breathing. It wasn’t in the script, but it was truer than the line that followed, so we kept it. That’s the strange alchemy of rehearsal, where accidents become architecture.

Then there’s Rodelio Lewis (The Spook), who’s practically conducting dark matter. His voice slides between registers, something human one second and subterranean the next. During the flying sequence, he moves as though he’s conversing with gravity itself. Watching him, I understood that The Spook isn’t a character but a phenomenon, an echo of fear and desire that the play merely borrows.

And the Shadows, Ernesto De Jesus, Seraya Mentor, and Marlon Murigagumbo, continue to unnerve me. The first time they slipped into their animalistic choreography, it felt ancient, like a ritual resurfacing from some buried collective memory. Their bodies became text. I could never have written that movement; it had to be conjured.

What I love most about this process is how much of it resists authorship. The script offers a skeleton, but the rehearsal room gives it breath, the invisible architecture of timing, energy, resistance. Meaning isn’t delivered; it’s excavated. Between each gesture, each glance, each half-swallowed line, there’s a negotiation between what I intended and what the actors discovered.

In the end, Naked Spaces became something that lives between intention and accident, between what’s written and what’s found. The play I wrote is still there somewhere, but it’s now draped in the ghosts of rehearsals, in the breath of actors who dared to step beyond the text. And honestly, that’s the only version worth watching.

Naked Spaces is on the NTN Back Stage from 06-08 November 2025, 20h00.