Audio recording and manipulation by Liz Rainsberry;
Spoken word written by Emily Gregory;
Choreography by Jasper Llewellyn;
Performed by Liz Rainsberry, Renata Novaes, Emily Gregory, Ziyi Li, Jasper Llewellyn, Mike Brooks, and Chi-you Ding;
Recorded and performed at the George Wood Theatre, Goldsmiths University of London, on 8th December 2016.
statement//
Our piece is an examination of the tension between the real and the unreal. As a group, we discovered we were interested in the question of how the objective, physical, human relationship with nature (the real) is abstracted by the attempt to describe or talk about it via subjective, representational forms (the unreal).
The moment an attempt is made to communicate this relationship, we found, even in a live setting, it has already entered a realm of artificial representation via metaphor, narrative, and the subjective context of performance, and has, therefore, been made other than it is. This idea was developed in response to the stylized representations of natural elements in Tarkovksy’s Mirror, which are only ever depicted in the film through the subjective lens of memory. Our experimentation with elements (ice and heat are the two we ultimately chose to represent onstage in this piece) led us to develop a piece in which an individual’s physical, intimate relationship with one element devolves, and splits via artistic processes into increasingly hyperreal representations, until all that is left is a moment of hyperreality and the original “real” moment is lost. The dramaturgy of our piece was influenced by Dickie Beau's work and Dimitris Papaioannou’s piece NOWHERE (2009), and the concept by Jean Baudrillard's book Simulacra and Simulation.
