Output details

Ghost Track and Kong Lear

Ghost Track and Kong Lear are, respectively, a solo performance and Super 8mm film touring internationally to festivals, conferences, museums, galleries, universities, and professional touring theatres. The main research question for the project was: How can the autobiographical material of the solo performer braid with fictional narrative? The subsidiary question was: How can that material be staged with a film work that acts as the live performance’s B side? The research methodologies employed performance writing strategies working with the artist Gary Winters, specifically in relation to repetition, textual intervention and scoring. Writing investigated the repetitive cycle of language in act one scene one of King Lear to braid with the performer’s own narratives about fathers. The work also considered the scenographic staging of this written material using three stations that corresponded to Freud’s psychoanalytic model of the id, ego and super ego. The results found that such staging determined the specific content, tone and form of performance.

The ‘B side’ Super 8 film was silent and featured composed intertitles that spoke of the live performer’s unconscious as a hybrid character’s, known as Kong Lear. The film reveals an uncanny voice that appears as a mischievous, playful and lonely alternative to the staged, presented autobiography.

Kong Lear featured a public installation at Bar Lane Studios, York, in February 2011 and was presented as a keynote paper at Queen Mary University, 2012. Professor Carl Lavery has delivered a paper on Kong Lear at York St John University and at the universities of Helsinki and Worcester. Claire Hind and Gary Winters have given a paper at the Norwegian Theatre Academy in January 2013 and Aberystwyth University in February 2013 and have sold 50 copies of the Kong Lear Archive to UK libraries.