Biography

Hannah Sibai is a British/Syrian designer based in Yorkshire. She trained at Wimbledon School of Art and has designed over eighty productions across the UK and Europe, working across various mediums including theatre, film, music videos and installations. Hannah regularly collaborates with directors, writers, choreographers and composers to create design-led work from the earliest stages of development. She often leads design workshops for arts organisations, community centres, festivals, schools and universities.

Her work in theatre includes The Doncastrian Chalk Circle (Cast + National Theatre Public Acts), A Tale of Orpheus & Eurydice (Opera North), SWIM (Theatre by the Lake), REGNANT (HOME), Love N Stuff (Oldham Coliseum), Meet Me At Dawn (Hope Mill Theatre), The Travelling Pantomime and The Elves and the Shoemakers (York Theatre Royal), The Boy Who Cried Wolf (Tutti Frutti), Two and Teechers (Gala Theatre), Pygmalion and Handbagged (English Theatre Frankfurt), and WANTED and Country Music (Leeds Playhouse),

Public Acts is the National Theatre’s nationwide initiative to create extraordinary acts of theatre and community. They partnered with Cast to create The Doncastrian Chalk Circle. Our story follows the journey of Grusha who risks everything to rescue a baby left behind during a revolution.

The cast was made up of over 100 people from local community organisations including an acro-dance group, a brass band and a choir, plus 5 professional performers and a live band.

The design challenge was to keep the space open enough to accommodate all these bodies, yet create a distinct language of location and costume for all of the different places and people Grusha meets on her epic journey. The floorboards in the set are a box of tricks – picket fences pop out and a window pops open. The back wall opens to reveal a hidden walkway, opening more fully to reveal a lit cyclorama as the story unfolds.