LAM Sisterhood represents a beautiful combination of creativity, work and sisterhood between Kenyan theatre artists, Laura Ekumbo, Aleya Kassam and Anne Moraa. Where some people prefer not to mix business and pleasure, LAM sisterhood has taken the risk, and it’s paying off.
This LAM Sisterhood artistic union was perfectly crafted after working on the 2018 show, Too Early for Birds: Brazen Edition, an Ode to Heroines of the Past, Present and the Future.
Co-produced by StoryZetu as the fourth edition of Too Early for Birds, the ladies of LAM Sisterhood researched, wrote and starred in the theatre production that told the story of six remarkable women from Kenya’s history: Field Marshall Muthoni wa Kirima, Zarina Patel, Mekatilili wa Menza, Wangu wa Makeri, Chelagat Mutai and the woman who brought down Luanda Magere. This experimental narrative production sold out five times, sparking a reflection series on The Elephant, rave reviews and won several national awards.
Too Early for Birds: Brazen Edition, an Ode to Heroines of the Past, Present and the Future was the beginning of the Brazen Universe. After the success of Brazen, there was no looking back. Since then, the ladies have staged digital and live performances with Theatre for One, Rights Con and Strictly Silk among others. They have taught their unique collaborative writing process at New York University (Abu-Dhabi), St. Lawrence University and the Africa Leadership Center.
The LAM sisterhood ladies also host Sister Salons, a collective celebration occasion honouring creatives they love as well as featuring showcases of diverse art forms such as live performances, spoken word, songs, and poetry.
See also: Faded: Beyond the Dance
While writing Brazen the ladies thought it would be great for little ones to enjoy the stories as well. A gentle pushback against foreign kids’ content further spurred on the creation of Kabrazen. They staged their first storytelling show commissioned by Book Bunk at the Kaloleni Social Hall in 2019. When the Covid 19 pandemic struck they could not stage live shows anymore. That provided a natural pivot to podcasting.
Last year in celebration of the 2023 Mashujaa Day (Heroes Day), KaBrazen podcast presented the first live bilingual children’s podcast performance in English and Kiswahili produced and developed in Nairobi, featuring digital stories of brazen African women. This season won the Association of African Podcasters and Voice Artists Children’s Podcast of the Year Award.
LAM Sisterhood recently worked in collaboration with Studio Ang and Kikapu Studio to develop The Mysteries of Jabali and Sauti which includes a series of children’s storybooks, comics, activities and more.
Laura, Aleya and Moraa are oozing with intentional and gracious care for each other, creativity, bravery, sweetness, rage, vulnerability and love that they share in their monthly LAM letter. But let’s pause, and rewind. We need to step back and hear the LAM Sisterhood tale from the beginning. Right from the sisters themselves.
The LAM Sisters on their Relationship
I would like you to introduce each other to our readers- Moraa tell me about Aleya.
Aleya is an earth sign named after air which means ‘uplift’. The constant contradiction to stay grounded with the desire to go far is a through line in her work and art. She’s a delight and joy to everyone who knows her and meets her. Aleya’s writing and work is something I have admired years before we collaborated. She writes very intimately and personally in a way that illuminates the grander picture. She is cool people; she’s fun, loves food and enjoyment- always seeking delight and will fight to the death to make sure everyone accesses it too.
Aleya, tell us about Laura.
Continuing with the star sign conversation, Laura is a true Gemini, inhabiting two different things often simultaneously and willing to go. She’s willing to explore the depths and crevices of each side and is really interested in the process as much as the output. She is moved by and engaging in so many forms of art at the same time, she’s on a discovery and incredibly generous with how she shares it.
Laura, tell us about Moraa.
She’s an Aquarius. She cares deeply about humans but also not. She’s also such a freedom fighter and has expanded my understanding of what freedom fighting could look like. That’s how she uses her intelligence and knowledge, for the benefit of those around her. She’s very funny, with various variations of humour. She is such a strategic thinker and that comes out in her writing as well, a brilliant writer and editor.
The Birth of LAM Sisterhood and Keeping the Bond
What is the story of the inception of the LAM sisterhood?
Laura: Aleya reached out to Moraa and I and said she wanted to gift herself a birthday present. She wanted to tell the story of bad-ass women in Kenyan history and she wanted it to be a stage play that could be part of the Too Early for Birds Universe. All of us had been a part of the Too Early for Birds (TEFB) universe in different ways; Aleya and Moraa had edited the scripts before they were cast in Brazen, while I had been on stage with TEFB for the very first show. Aleya had spoken to Abu and Ngartia (founders of Too Early for Birds) about wanting to put up the show. Really from jump, it was the two of us responding to Aleya’s ululation.
Aleya: I had quit my job and remember feeling very tired as a Kenyan woman. I started to wonder how women before us did things- wanting to tap into that energy, the ferocity, the fire, the tenderness -really curious about that and wanting to seek strength primarily.
I know I couldn’t do this alone; it had to be done in sisterhood. So, the very first step was to ululate outwards.
The three of us really love the stage and it felt like the place to begin. We also had a hunch that it would take a storytelling approach as per the TEFB style but we didn’t know who the women were. We started with a vision document; this guided what we were doing, why we were doing it, what we wanted the process to be like, what we wanted the output be and the women we were interested in.
We crowd sourced the women together with some of the women we wanted to talk about. We wanted it to capture a range, not just political but in terms of contemporary, historical and geographical age.
I still think it’s a miracle we were even able to create Brazen. We didn’t know what we were doing, we were funding it out of pocket, and we showed up for each other every weekend. We worked through each other’s discomfort and ickyness of not knowing each other’s personalities …all the things. The fact that three people who never worked together came up with a piece after 9 months, I don’t know how to describe that this thing shouldn’t have made sense but it did.
See also: Miangaly Theatre Company: Defining the Stage in Madagascar
Why does this combination of the three of you work?
Moraa: I’ve been part of many different collaborative projects in different capacities and there is an element of luck. You meet the right people at the right time for the right thing. We share deep common values. We know who we are here for and who the work is for. We know we don’t want to make work that is harmful to the people who matter to us; very specifically African women and non-binary people. We want to live in a world that is a better place for us and those around us. This helps us when we have intense fights and disagreements about everything else.
We have a deep respect for each other’s work and artistry. We have enough respect to disagree loudly but kindly and leave room for you to fight if you believe you are right, and to know that there is something there you are both reaching for that maybe neither of you has seen. We have deep respect and commitment to a process that is mutually supportive and supportive hopefully of people who join us and join the team. I think that’s what enabled this partnership to work; I think that’s what stands out as the secret sauce for me.
Aleya: We are three different generations- 20s, 30s and 40s. Bringing different perspectives to the work and yet, there is no hierarchy. Everyone’s life experiences and perspectives are valid. That has never been in dispute. We show up for each other as much as we show up for the work which was solidified during Brazen. We are at stages in our life where we can be present as we are building a young company. There is a level of serendipity as well.
Laura: We do have similar backgrounds as well-we come from a certain level of privilege, we went to British Curriculum schools with similar experiences of Nairobi. I’m the youngest, Moraa is a middle child and Aleya is the eldest and we are each from families of three. There is a familiarness about us that even when we came together made it such that we could be ourselves and slip into full versions of ourselves. Those similarities make us better collaborators. It feeds into how we communicate, understand, support and care for one another. It also feeds into how we interact with people outside of ourselves. There is a bubble about the three of us but we’ve learnt how to cultivate and strategically bring people in and share.
The Creative Business, Funding, and Creating a Comfortable House for a Sisterhood
How have you made a living out of this creative work?
Moraa: In the beginning, when we were working, we would reinvest back to the company. Over time we found a mix of clients- people who liked our work whether it was Brazen, the LAM Letter or different productions we’d been involved in. They would ask us to teach workshops with them which led to more work. We’ve had to do a lot of proposal writing, a lot of pitching. In 2019 we had 0 % success rate with every pitch we made. We are very privileged to have a really solid support network and having people who invested in the work.
We found we lost our way during that {pitching} process, trying to be a media company doing media things; as opposed to a company that made women feel seen, heard and beloved. We realised we needed to go back to where we started, to that first night sitting on a balcony writing Brazen. Two days after making that decision we got a call from a client- ‘Hey, do you want to come and get a small cheque telling stories about African women?’ Remembering our why has definitely been very useful.
There are a lot of opportunities we’ve had to let go of because there was something we were working on. There are times we’ve also had to sacrifice the work we love to do for work that pays.
Laura: To add on to that- the double-sided sword is you have to find infrastructure that supports the life you want or you have to build it yourself. This goes back to the opportunity cost- you spend 3/5 days sending emails, doing accounting; doing more than is in your job description. When you think about pay equity doing 50,000 jobs, when does it level out for how much effort we put in?
In the world where money moves around, the structures that are there have been set up in oppressive ways. We are infrastructure building because we are African feminists and artists. If we had fallen into an infrastructure it would have been oppressive. There’s something so beautiful about building a house that you feel comfortable in. It means there is so much more to do to actually enjoy the house.
Aleya: To sort of add to that we are building a house on land that was cleared by those before us, specifically by women. I think specifically women artists have had to do the thing of building the business, ecosystem, industry and infrastructure and the art is always the thing that has suffered. That’s one of the hardest things about being in this space; the easiest thing to fall by the wayside is the making. That’s why the LAM Letter arose. We are learning ways to be smarter about what we can afford to make, how the making is funded, finding sacred spaces for ourselves to make, but the burnout is real. We’ve learnt to intentionally take January as a slow month because the rest of the year is such a flurry. This isn’t LAM but LAM Sisterhood. We are interested in building a space and creating a community where they can benefit from and build their dreams on as well.
See also: TheTheatreTimes.com: Towards Transnational Digital Infrastructure
What has been your most memorable project to date?
Moraa: Kabrazen (the podcast) is a project that is close to me because we are all aunties. I sent the previews to my nephews and they are so in love with stories about African women. My brother is like, “You have to send me other episodes; they want me to play these episodes all the time before bedtime.” There is no greater high for me.
Laura: I just want to touch on the Kwale experience, just at the start of the company. We were trying to find a balance between creative work and corporate work to balance the books. We found as well that different people were approaching us separately for work that could now be channeled to the company…
Aleya: You know how a car goes through a crash test to find out if it’s safe? That’s what it was like, that we survived that Kwale experience makes me believe that we are going to be ok. We were together for three weeks sharing one room, writing the screenplay for Nambwa Fm. The film was a story of how girls and young women can rise up against the odds and drive change in the community. We developed co-creation tools, met with the community, developed the screenplay with an incredible group of women (16 women and a baby) and wrote it with another community member who translated it to Swahili. Timelines were crazy- we’d never written a screenplay, we were literally googling the 3 act structure. The film went on to win five Kalasha awards and got a special mention for originality at the Humanitarian Communication Awards (2021). That we got through that, I feel certain that whatever the world throws at us, we can navigate.
Moraa: Many shout outs to women who already know (how to script a) story. People ask us what genre do you write- we can write anything but what does it do? If you want it to be for African women and kids and non-binary people then we can make a chair into a beautiful story. The ‘why’ of it has proven to be more important than the output. Even the podcast, the reason why it’s a podcast is because children listen very intently and podcast can go into radio and be syndicated. You make the thing for the medium that it’s going to do the best work in, instead of being constrained by medium.
Moraa, you have provided the perfect segue into my next question, about the podcast.
Moraa: Kids love to listen to stories. Children have vivid imaginations and they are very attentive. We found through topline research that children have longer attention spans which decrease as you grow slightly older. Kids love to listen, it doesn’t put pressure on them to perform. Before switching curriculums, I was studying in the 8-4-4 system and there was all this pressure to look like you were paying attention: face forward, nod your head. My nephew is listening while running full sprint ahead…but he will tell you what the story is about. My other nephew will sit quietly and nod and say ‘Again’.
Laura: Yes to a podcast because it really suits how they learn. It’s why storytelling is the way we taught children things to learn. Storytelling is the way we’ve always done things just that we’ve added a little bit of tech.
See also: Translating the Act: Kenyan Producers Keeping Indigenous Languages in Auditoriums
New Opportunities and Creating During a Pandemic
How did the pandemic affect your creative process?
Aleya: We had a bit of experience working remotely in 3 different areas of the world writing a show about menstruation in 2019.We’d wake up at 5:30am and meet on Zoom or Celtx or Google Docs and write for an hour and after however many months- we ended up with this beautiful show that we haven’t produced. We learnt how it is to write something collaboratively when we are apart. One thing this experience taught us was showing up in whatever state you are in.
The other thing we learned to do is how to balance the creative and the admin. Wednesday is our creative day. We structure our day in blocks of four (4 hours) with dance and poetry breaks. We also have shared systems online and embracing there are times when it is important to be together physically but that it’s useful to be away. Even our working hours evolved.
Laura: The pandemic was heartbreaking for many people and in different ways for artists especially after being declared non-essential. This was the moment where we pivoted and went back to our roots as opposed to being a company existing in a corporate space. We are so lucky to be 3 of us. That’s the only reason why the LAM sisterhood as a company still exists.
Moraa: Having people you can reach out to when you are falling apart, it’s a gift. I cannot say how grateful I am for all the people who allowed us to go to their houses and just cry. People who were cheering us on, people who mentioned our names in rooms…women are incredible. I know that’s something we are trying to be for people who we are bringing into our community as much as we possibly can. If you have people who can critique you in the kindest and gentlest of ways keep them close because it’s a gift.
Aleya: There was this woman who wanted to invest in our company since she watched Brazen in 2018. We didn’t want to take the money until we were sure about how we were going to use it .It came to that point where we said if we were going to make work for ourselves ,we would need money for that to open. Then this woman was like – ‘I have been promising you since 2018, I’m at a point in my life where I have money to invest in, and this is also part of my legacy work so it’s yours to do with it as you wish.’ That’s what allowed us to do the Bi Kidude episode on the podcast, which is how we were shortlisted for Google PRX Podcast Creator Programme (2018) and the BBC World Service International Podcast Competition (2021). That is how we survived that year there was no client work.
Moraa: And that’s a lesson in trusting, which is very hard for artists- because you never know who your work will reach, who it will resonate with-hold those moments tenderly. If somebody sees you, hold those moments closely. If you really know why you are doing the thing that you are doing your intention always shows through. But that’s why art is such a risk, you could spend millions on something and no one wants to see it or you could spend close to nothing and it makes you millions.
Let’s talk about AKU Fellowship…
Aleya: I am a member of the Ismaili Community and have done work with the Aga Khan- so I saw it in the community Whatsapp group. By the time this opportunity found us we had zero percent success rate, but I was convinced, this is us- we could get that. Moraa by then had a fantastic approach which was every application gets us closer to articulating an idea that we have both in the language, work plan and budget of it. So we took this as an opportunity to flesh out the idea of the Brazen universe. It was actually a really good application process. So when the winners were announced we were working on an iteration of the Weaver Bird musical – they were announcing on Zoom and Laura had her headphones on only half listening, shock on us when LAM sisterhood was announced!
The stability came with a physical space for us to work from, an investment into our product which went towards KaBrazen, training opportunities, a requirement to systemise which meant we could accept and use big money when it comes. It pushed us not to do everything as 3 and create departments, expand the team. One of the challenges I hope they address is how to encourage innovation because we are not a media company or a news outlet- we are a content studio. That being said we have challenged them as much as they have challenged us.
Laura: I think it was lovely to see where we can fit in- A lot of the way we make can align with infrastructure that exists. Some applications look outside the box but what will they make possible for you? How can you find a way to make yourself align in a way that stays true to who you are and impacts the place that’s supporting you in a mutually beneficial way?
It’s part of what is happening in the ecosystem, artistically right now HEVA, THE NEST have done so much work in making accountants for instance interested in helping artists break even, to be an ROI almost.
What is next for the LAM sisterhood?
Moraa: We want to have KaBrazen in multiple languages, colouring books, guides for adults. We have some unfinished work as well: an adult podcast, a musical, the variety show about periods, helping people tell stories, we are excited about those opportunities.
In a world that is quickly evolving to a global village existing in physical and digital spaces, I am inspired by these three remarkable women that are doing all that they can to preserve not just our histories, document and celebrate the African woman’s contributions, and continue to create space for themselves, other women and other minoritised peoples, and children in work and stories.
Perhaps the biggest inspiration is that whatever the work or the hardship, the headache of making the creative business sustainable, one thing is for sure – Laura, Aleya and Moraa are sisters first.
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