Output details

Lost Luggage Porters, street theatre performance with strolling and static sequences.

This project asked research questions relating to audience interaction and meaning making: how various signs from film genres are interpreted in a street performance. The Lost Luggage Porters is a mixed media performance involving non-verbal characters, a soundscape and puppetry. The audience showed an immediate grasp of the contextual meanings, understanding both the master/servant relationship, and essential contextual narrative of the lost characters from the simple action of producing a map and looking quizzical.

The more complex ongoing narrative, deriving from Baurillardian notions of simulation, involves both characters loving a singer present in prop newspapers and signed celebrity photographs. Her presence as a puppet emerging from a suitcase rather than another performer raises issues of ‘late romanticism's fascination with the "double" ’ as Charles Davis puts it, pointing out that ‘these puppet "doubles" may have brought with them their own trace of the uncanny’ (Davis: 137). This aspect is provoked - at the Uxbridge performance, for example, children associated the Diva puppet with the horror genre (exclaiming to each other ‘there’s a body in the trunk’). Summarised by the Diva puppet the Porters are conceived as lost in a mediated world (they are silent film characters) where simulation rather than relational aesthetic govern their actions, even as they instill in their viewers a form of communitas.

Recent invitations from council funded festivals in Derby and Uxbridge allowed this on-going work, first made with the help of a small arts council grant almost ten years ago, to receive revision to its narrative structure and clarify these research objectives. The work received positive reviews and exposure in local media, e.g. http://www.thisisderbyshire.co.uk/FEST-Eacute-video-pictures-special/story-19864015-detail/story.html.

Davis, C. B. (1998) Reading the Ventriloquist's Lips: The Performance Genre behind the Metaphor in TDR, Vol. 42, No. 4 (Winter, 1998), pp. 133-156, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.