Output details

Fissure

Fissure is part of a wider enquiry into how site-specific performance can articulate relationships between rural landscapes and human life events. Here we asked if a walking performance could explore the director’s loss of her 29 year-old sister through a brain tumour, and such an exploration has wider resonances. Accordingly, for three years we investigated analogies between neurology and physical geography with the help of neurologists, geologists, cavers and mountain leaders.

This research led to a three day performance in which an audience of 80 was led in relays over and under the Yorkshire Dales National Park: in a train from Settle; at a station and around a vast disused quarry at Ribblehead; by an exposed cave system at Long Churn; over limestone pavements at Thwaite Scars; through Erratics at Nober; into St James’ Church, Clapham; deep inside the show caves at Ingleton; and finally up Ingleborough. Whilst Burns’ poetry sung by Pook’s six singers increasingly took the woman’s story into the realm of Greek and Christian myth, my choreography embodied a sense of human struggle with an implacable nature by forging a link between that story and the physical challenges posed to my six dancers at those locations. If audience groups witnessed this struggle, the accumulative effect of walking for three days, not least of all whilst clinging to each other through 50 mph winds towards the summit of Ingleborough, meant they participated in it too.

Fissure featured in articles in BBC Online, The Guardian (10 May 2011), and The Times Higher (19/5/2011). It was reviewed by The Independent on Sunday (29/5/2011) and later cited it as one of the three best UK shows of 2011. The show was short-listed for best production design in the 2013 World Design Exhibition, and was featured on BBC’s Countryfile.