We Are Human

There is one thing that unites us: we are all human. We are discovering together that we are all

“subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means”.

During the pandemic, which affected everyone on a global scale, the whole world experienced the same situation, the same emotions, the same suffering. It highlighted our shared humanity as we found ourselves united through crisis.

We realised the importance of connecting with others, as soon as that privilege was taken away from us. We connected with friends, family and colleagues possibly more than we did before. We felt the need to reach out to those around us, from using international phone and video calls, to sharing a meme of a cat standing in line at a supermarket! We enjoy a shared experience, a conversation, a joke.

This is human.

We felt the need to bind together to understand that we are all human, despite our individual choices, beliefs, traits, cultures, customs, jobs, ages, skin colour, gender, religion.

As a direct response to the 2020 global COVID-19 pandemic, our Butterfly community created a celebration of humanity using Shylock’s ‘I am a Jew’ speech, released on Shakespeare’s birthday 23rd April 2020.

We asked our community to video themselves reciting Shakespeare’s famous speech, slotting in how they uniquely identify themselves as individuals. This powerful speech highlights that despite the differences in our intrinsic identity - 

We Are All Human.

Butterfly Theatre Collective’s work is centred around connection. Our focus is on immersive, site-specific theatre, but a particular speciality of ours is working with Shakespeare. Our aim is to make Shakespeare relevant and accessible, and our thoughts, after the global crisis hit, landed on Shylock’s ‘I am a Jew’ speech. No other Shakespeare speech could have been more true at that time; a universal playwright answers a universal situation.