Output details

Kellerman

Research in this mid-scale multi-media performance work focused on exploring and discovering scenographic solutions for the ways in which the narrative dexterity of cinema and the graphic novel might be made physically present as theatrical form. Across two phases of research and development, with funding from Arts Council England (£98K), Quick and Brooks, in collaboration with designer Laura Hopkins, created a two storey set that utilised a series of moving screens in combination with still and moving projected imagery to provide a theatrical means to stage cinematic processes of editing and filmic storytelling.

Exploring sources as varied as the graphic novel, 50s British Cinema, the letters of Sigmund Freud and Rococo music; Kellerman explores the fragile operations of memory, how lives can be structured as fictions and how the logics of fantasies can have terrifying consequences. Core to this work is research into the operations of memory and delusion and their relationship to contemporary narrative. The piece attempts to suture graphic novel aesthetics onto theatrical conventions to investigate new dramaturgical possibilities for contemporary theatrical storytelling. In Kellerman the protagonist’s inability to find a stable psychological state is actively presented through a series of competing narratives and realities that are staged before us. Current investigations of time, particularly new thinking around quantum theories of temporality, informed the scenographic and dramaturgical approaches adopted in Kellerman. The challenge Kellerman presented was locating an appropriate form that might embody, rather than illustrate, the conceptual frameworks that the surrounded the work. Touring nationally and abroad, Kellerman received reviews in The Guardian, The Times, Metro and The Observer. The full text, in English and French, is published as a book by The University of Toulouse Press (2012).