Output details

The Zero Hour

This mid-scale multimedia performance work focuses on the experience of Berlin at the end of World War Two to explore the evolution of Europe and the mythologies of European identity. The performance is structured through the layering of different versions of post war Europe from the starting point of the year zero that begins with the fall of Berlin in 1945. Weaving a series of narratives that move across different versions of history, The Zero Hour sutures theatrical stagings of alternate histories with cinematic conventions to interrogate the way in which our culture uses history and cinema as a mode of identity creation. Research in The Zero Point focuses on innovative design, new projection technologies and original writing to question and explore how, in the post war period, and often through the lens of the moving image, history has been transformed into spectacle and examines the ways in which this reliance on spectacle for the source of historical truth often overlooks other ways of understanding the past. The Zero Point was a Live at Lica commission and received £98,000 of Arts Council England funding. The Zero Hour also directly benefitted from the University’s allocation of £96,000 capital funding to LICA to support work that utilises projectors and projection technology (awarded in 2011) and uses much of the digital equipment made available through the ARHC funded DIALab project (£180K), on which The Zero Hour is a named project.

Quick is the co-writer and director of the work and co-editor of Theatricalising Cinema: imitating the dog’s The Zero Hour and Six Degrees Below the Horizon, published for The British Council’s International Edinburgh Showcase in 2013. The Zero Hour received national press coverage and was seen by over 200 international delegates at the Showcase.