Below is the project proposal that I used to get a slot at Emergency Poolside. I’m very excited about it as it is honest, which is something that I have been battling with. It’s a new direction that I can get my teeth into and investigate some interesting approaches to making narrative.
What I also want to celebrate is how little a great performer needs to do to engage an audience. I was Clowning again this weekend with a teacher from Lisbon called Sam Meyler. He was very complimentary about my presence, saying that I ‘changed the space’ and I was ‘very open’. It’s nice to hear things like that isn’t it!?
Scream Away (a love story for one player)
We are in a street.
It is hot. We are near water.
A woman screams.
Pleasure and pain slide across her face.
We are witness.
Our eyes flash like cameras, processing the cry leaping out of her body and into the air.
It’s a teeth grinder.
A lung burster.
A gut wrencher.
An explosion in the pit of her perineum as her whole belief system falls and crumbles before our eyes.
Scream Away plays and repeats and plays and repeats archived footage of this moment, this incident. But this is not video-tape being paused, rewound and played again. It is live creation. Liveness with a cinematic feel, inviting audience inquiry as to why this woman is screaming. In the here and now, witnesses are not yet witnesses. They are players. Evidence is created before the audience’s eyes. Their perspective switches as different personae appear to reveal new insights into what has taken place, before they dissolve again. Just as our heroine’s scream will.
Eventually.
