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Island

I wrote, directed and co-performed this ensemble performance, first seen in May 2010, which subsequently toured internationally. The five performers were experienced artists in their own right. It was designed for a controlled but public space, neither a gallery nor theatre. The performers sit amongst the audience, so initially they are indistinguishable from them. They stand and point to one another, offering names, ambiguously inventing or remembering. The performers reluctantly take the names. The attribution is expanded to include relationships that connect the newly named performers to each other in an increasingly complex network. The performers acquire multiple names and relationships that no longer correspond to their gender, ethnicity or age. Emotional ties become factual statements in a memory game.

The script was developed with the performers through rehearsal. The network of relationships had to become so complex that the connections were difficult to retain and ultimately collapsed. The fiction was a conspicuous pretext for the growing interconnections between the invented characters. The conceptual cat’s-cradle structure was the significant aspect of the work, not the emerging narrative, so the balance of information was crucial. As the fictional framework collapses, the individuals return to the audience. The culturally indeterminate space bridges art and theatre worlds. The allusion to John Donne’s proposition that ‘no man is an island’ is underplayed but key.

The work investigated the bodies of both the performance and the audience, to see the structure of the work as a web or network, integrated with the audience rather than a bounded, separate object. The aim was to explore performance as a branch of sculpture and work against the idea of spectacle. Speech was an integral part of the structure and action. My aim was to make challenging work accessible to a wide audience.