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Void story

Void Story is a multi-media performance created with and performed by Forced Entertainment. My role in the work is writer and director, and the creator of the 400 collage images that make up the backbone of the piece.

This 80-minute performance presents a post-apocalyptic narrative through the interaction of 400 original projected images, computer sound effects and treated human voice. Occupying a formal space between deconstructed cinema and radio play, Void Story presents the dubbing of an imaginary movie, staging a radical split between stage image (projection) and sound (amplified voices treated with computer alterations and sound effects) to create an event that unfolds in the viewer’s imagination. Exploring theatrical form, the project explores questions around presence, identification and narrative construction – the 4 performers are seated at tables throughout the work, reading from scripts and using computers to trigger music and sound effects to illustrate the narrative. The theatrical action meanwhile is reduced to a sequential projection of images – collages that show the protagonists in an unfolding picaresque.

Void Story asks where the illusionistic and empathetic power of performance might lie in relation to interdisciplinary and technologically oriented theatre. Via research into ventriloquism (specifically ideas raised in Stephen Connor’s Dumbstruck; Mladen Dollar’s Nothing But A Voice) as well work on the body in relation to voice and language (Elaine Scarry’s The Body In Pain) the project seeks to understand embodiment and the layered processes of projection involved in performance, cinema and identification.

I was commissioned in 2012 to create an exhibition version of this work (3 screen video projection and series of photo prints) for the show Acts of Voicing at Stuttgart Kunstverein. The exhibition subsequently toured to the Total Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea and goes to Parasite Space, Hong Kong (2014).