I’m not the first to discover that if we can focus performance away from the
notion of ‘rehearsal’ and more towards ‘spontaneous’ or ‘lived experience’ and
be ‘in the moment’, we are somewhere closer to bringing audiences and
performers together in mutual appreciation. Performance becomes like ‘real
life’ and ‘real life’ like performance and we get closer to the very purpose of it.
Where the inner imagination meets outer experience is the holy grail of the
performer, and ultimately what makes us want to witness it.
One way in which we have particularly set out to achieve this, is by making site specific
happenings for buildings and spaces where people are unaccustomed to
seeing performance. This can helpfully change expectations and bring to light
the potential for new things happening moment by moment.
A theatre or concert hall with its traditional arrangement of seats and stage,
set up an expectation of performers and audience behaving in a certain way. In
site specific work spontaneity is in the nature of the beast, we simply have to
accommodate the possibility of something unexpected happening as a result
of the site. This could happen with light, architecture, people, sound or
movement, so if the aesthetic and compositional structure is designed to
accommodate that, then each and every performance is significantly different,
which keeps the work fresh and energetic which is what I find fascinating.
All be it abstract, the more possible interpretations, the more universal this work becomes.
Why not join us, tune in, respond.
The Sound at The End of the Tunnel, is set in a disused quarry location on the edge above Wirksworth. Its a steep walk up the hill, where the miners old workshops run out, and the houses recede more and more into the rock. The music can be accessed online as well, and after the event onsite, via a mobile so there are many ways in here.
There are various players too: Paddy, Robbie, Gwilym and us, and too – whoever takes the walk up the lane, animal, mineral: and of the surface ground, the remarkable acoustic of the abandoned tunnel itself. Of the air, and deep underneath it. Where once there was a vast sea in Jurassic time, where lead, silver, limestone was quarried by hand, and by machine and afterwards the quarry is abandoned. The Sound at the End of the Tunnel is after that, ‘the light at the end of the tunnel’ – how we see things when other things are over, the space after darkness, the peace after restlessness, the simplicity after confusion, we hope to see it to be in it. The rusted scrap, abandoned pipes, heaps of wire, and the metal tunnel itself, leads us to the other side, where between the cracks of tarmac, rain has fallen, and just enough damp collected there for something to take root, for alpine strawberrys to grow. ‘We go slow as life in progress’, nature is re-wilding, berrys, plants and birds, arise from the silence and vast void left once the quarrymen have gone. The ancient layers of stone and minerals laid down, after 100’s of years of exploitation are left to rest, and there is a place for us to play and a place where people, and living things can breathe.