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The Ghost of Someone Not Yet Drowned

Concept, text, visuals, exhibition: NEWALL; Sound design, diffusion: Lauke. Choreography, performance: Griffin, Man. Funded: ACE, EHU. Ghost comprised of a multi-media installational performance alongside an exhibition offering summative exegesis of process and previous projects, including: Morgue; Blodeuwedd (2010); A Fairy Tale Not Yet Written; Korrigan’s Lair (2011). All explored disembodied (recorded) voices, taking influence from Reich’s It’s Gonna Rain, with layering and repetition creating a ‘canon’ or ‘round’, with phrases moving in and out of synch. Cathy Lane’s discourse was also influential. This project explored stories, not as linear texts, but as experiences, by means of performative interrogations of Russian Formalist notions of fabula and sjuzhet. Research imperative: to integrate extant/ambient sound and site attributes with added sound, text and dance to make an experiential performance (sjuzhet) of a site narrative (fabula). Ghost engaged with narratives of expectation with which audiences encounter unknown yet familiar spaces (a swimming pool) and interrogated the uncanny subversion of such familiar narratives with the unexpected or unfamiliar (absence of water, sounds, visions). Research questions: How might a writer engage with a sound artist to create text sound? How can ‘familiar’, given site ‘texts’ be interwoven with new, ‘unfamiliar’ fictions to create uncanny experience? This project included live but silent performers (absent from previous works) visual fractured language (via projected word-image animations), and advanced practical principles previously explored outdoors in a semi-derelict interior. Audiences were invited to tweet with the ghost during the event. Although designed as walk-through experiences, people often lingered to hear complete narrative cycles. Morgue, Blodeuwedd, Fairy Tale and Korrigan were installed in Secret Light Garden, Picton Castle and visited by 2000+ people (2010); and 4000+ (2011). Ghost’s audience was at capacity at 90. A film and sound presentation about Ghost, curated by Lauke, was exhibited at the V&A, 2012.