work in progress
Blank Productions
2012
Interdisciplinary performance project based on a text by Mark Hewitt.
with music (for string sextet) by Peter Copley
The production
scrublands is an interdisciplinary performance work bringing together a contemporary text in 26 movements; live music for string sextet by composer Peter Copley; and a range of high and low tech visual and audio strategies, ranging from additional text material presented on a fiercely wrought flipchart and OHP acetates; slide projections of still images (created in white pastel on black paper by visual artist Tom Walker); video sequences (shown as projections or in monitors); and the use of dictaphones and megaphones.
Three of Tom Walker's images for scrublands: ziz / all who come here come here alone / thick industrial gloves
Scenario
An unnamed protagonist is incarcerated in a dark confined space conjures a metamorphic escape plan. Projecting himself into a barren landscape, he searches for a way out - or a way into an alternative self with a different set of possibilities. Moving from the claustrophobic to the fantastical, the 26 movements that make up the narrative represent critical moments in this journey: small epiphanies, meditations, visions, panic attacks, pep talks addressed to self.
The text is epic in its dimension, yet with an antiheroic, postmodern tone; this imbalance providing the scraps of self-deprecating humour that underpin an otherwise bleak scenario.
Previews
scrublands will be previewed over three nights in a small underground space in the Old Police Cells Museum beneath Brighton Town Hall as part of Brighton Festival Fringe 2012. Led by a 'guide', audiences will experience a katabasis - or descent into an underworld - as evoked and inhabited by the protagonist.
Discarded text revision, 2009
scrublands was drafted in pencil and rubber in a large artist's sketchbook. Some of the discards from these intensively worked pages, bearing the marks of multiple drafts and erasures, were exhibited as part of a group exhibition during Eastbourne Festval 2009, curated by Cat Ingrams.