A Blank Canvas / Jabuti Theatre: In Her Shadows

Churchill referred to it as something other, something outside of himself that followed him, haunted him and, on occasion, consumed him: the black dog. Stephen Fry has publically implored us to consider that there is nothing other about depression, that it is simply, incurably, a periodic aspect of personality that is simply there. There are entire movements in literature, theatre, and visual art that seemingly exist to represent the anxieties and exaltations of depression’s torment, often with the condition projected as the only legitimate response to a world grown unacceptable to the mind. There are others who simply cannot lift a hand or speak a word when struck down.

Depression is, like any aspect of mental health and illness, necessarily personal and individual. This can be problematic for forensic and societal frameworks, driven as they are by their need for broad representation, or generalisation. It is too easy to frame a response that patronises or, worse, alienates individuals impacted directly by the issue being addressed.

In this sense artistic expression is as much at risk as medical or cultural policy makers, with the same consequence that in attempting to be sensitive to as broad a constituency as possible, the singularity of intent is lost in the well-intentioned sensitivity.

In Her Shadows, performed here within the Scottish Mental Health Arts & Film Festival, in Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre, announces itself as an examination of the complexities of depression and a challenge to the stigmas with which it is surrounded.

The piece invites us into the mind of Amy, a young woman returning to Scotland who is thrown into the torment and chaos of depression. Debbie Robbins and Rachael Macintyre, the two aerialists heading up Blank Canvas and Jabuti respectively, examine the territory through silk, rope, and ring work, as well as dance and movement.

Under previous Total Theatre Award Winner Cora Bissett’s direction the pair offer snapshots from a fractured narrative that highlight the internal conflicts, the struggle, and the rare moments of harmony that offer Amy a glimpse of respite. It is in these latter moments where the performers most impress. Working within the limited airspace of Traverse 1, and further constrained by the aerial hoop they share, the pair execute some beautifully touching shapes and movements: feet interlocking, heads flung back and torsos spinning, fingertips painfully short of reaching each other. Whilst there still seemed to be room for tightening up the skills there was enough here to realise the potential of aerial theatre as a mode well and lyrically suited to representing depression: the removal of solid ground, the restless spinning, the struggle to fool gravity and weightlessness into some kind of balanced repose, the beautiful forms that can suddenly emerge from knotted silks and tangled limbs. There is, at heart, a struggle to produce something of elegance from unlikely materials, and this, perhaps, speaks to the body of art that continues to arise from depression.

Robbie Thomson, Cryptic associate, and soon to be seen giving his penchant for kinetic installations and robotics full flight in Glasgow’s Sonica festival, provided a flexible and sympathetic production design comprising appropriately tensioned wires, supporting a stretched membrane onto which film loops, animations and texts are projected. One visual event deserving of singling out is an affecting, brutal sequence of texts illustrating the steep and savage void created by brief simple statements delivered via a medium that celebrates immediacy, whilst simultaneously supporting a means to become detached from all empathy.

Despite being clearly a labour of love for the two performers, there have been many hands brushing against this work in its development, including Grid Iron’s Ben Harrison and the aerialists, Paper Doll Militia. There have been lots of ideas thrown into the pot and not all of them appear to be resolved yet. It is still a sketched pot of ideas, still bubbling, still trying to find its unified flavour. A chair is tried out briefly, where depression snakes around the chair legs to stealthily ensnare her quarry. A shopping trolley makes a similarly brief, almost inexplicable appearance and is then discarded.

With much of the unity of the performance somewhat lost in the format of episodic fragments it came to the recorded recital of Jenny Lindsay’s poem Today to provide the genuinely raw core of the show. In a painfully concise descent the quality of passing days is measured from 10 to 1. We, the listeners, the witnesses, are helpless and can offer nothing as the quality of life thins out, the sense of cohesion disintegrates, and the eruptions of anxiety into an equally unstable manic high break apart the foundations of identity. One leaves the show with little new insight, and I was not aware of any particular stigma being challenged, but there was a renewed sensitivity to this universal condition that touches all, engulfs numerous, and, sadly ruins many.

Nathan Israël & Luna Rousseau: L’Homme de Boue

Presented at the Wickham as part of Bristol’s inaugural biennial festival of circus performance, Circus City, L’Homme de Boue (The Mud Man) is a collaboration between French artists Nathan Israël and Luna Rousseau, and one of a handful of shows from outside the UK bringing a distinctively European sensibility to the festival. We perhaps see more circus shows that are about the skills first and foremost, but in this unusual and compelling one-man performance, the skill – in this case juggling with clubs – plays second fiddle to the piece’s explicitly existential preoccupations.

Naked except for a pair of tiny grey boxer shorts, Israël stands before us on a circular playing space covered with clay in various states of wetness. There are a few boulder-sized hunks distributed about, and a clutch of white juggling clubs is propped against one of them. A serious-seeming, thick-set man, Israël looks more like a rugby player than a circus artist, and when he takes up the clubs and begins to juggle, it has all the ritual of the haka, the slap of the clubs as they land neatly in his palms creating a rhythm, like a heartbeat or a ticking clock.

It’s always seemed to me that juggling has something of an endless pursuit of the sublime about it, and L’Homme de Boue seems in part to be a manifestation of the tension between this and a counter urge: to return to earth – quite literally in this case. It’s not long before Israël’s rolling around in the clay, slathering himself until he’s slick and encrusted with chalky fragments. Returning to his feet, he’s at once statuesque and bestial, heaving a mound of clay up into the nape of his neck and staggering about, his chin pressed tight against his breastbone.

Throughout, Israël seems to be seeking some ultimate communion with or expression through the clay, and, notwithstanding his sincerity, there’s much humour to be had on the way: he parades around with clay as a courtly cap on his head, creates a whole-head clay helmet, and at one point buries his head in clay and remains upturned and static in a near-reverie. In one of the piece’s most effective sections, he juggles with three chunks of clay, alternately tossing one aside and creating a new third chunk from the remaining two, until they’re tiny flecks and disappear completely. And throughout too, just a few feet away from him, we are aware of the clay’s physical presence and properties – its weight, its earthy smell, its coolness to touch and its limitless malleability.

Before entering the theatre, we’re given a poem to read, which extends on the show’s copy by suggesting that the piece is concerned with the ‘disturbing’ universal primal instinct to return to the mud from which we all emerged. That it was felt necessary to supplement our experience of the piece in this way perhaps says more about a perception of audiences’ expectations of circus work than the impenetrability of the show’s ideas. For as an exploration of this instinct it’s eloquent and engaging. Whilst there’s a contrivance to the piece’s cyclical structure that perhaps prevents it from taking us anywhere too uncomfortable, Israël’s no-holds-barred performance gives us both the anguish and ecstasy involved in pursuing unaccountable urges and desires. L’Homme de Boue risks sharing an impulse with us and dares us not to feel the same.

Fierce 2015: What Will Be, Will Be

It’s a Wednesday night in central Birmingham, and we’re heading to BOM (Birmingham Open Media), a venue and artists’ studio close to New Street station which is the designated hub for Fierce Festival 2015, a five-day bonanza of live art, experimental theatre, installations, screenings and parties. We pass old-school Chinese restaurants with red dragon signage; a gaggle of girls with bare legs and massively high heels who are cheerily falling out of a taxi; a pub with peeling purple paint offering a special Monday night beer and curry deal (on a Wednesday?) And here we are. A blue neon pin-up girl announces Adultworld, the ‘gentlemen’s club’ opposite, illuminating the small group of smokers in animated conversation standing outside BOM. I’m reminded of an action Katie Etheridge did at the National Review of Live Art many years ago, in which she issued non-smokers with fake fags so they wouldn’t miss out on all the best conversations.

For Fierce, like the dearly departed NRLA, is more than a festival. Or perhaps it is a festival in the original sense of the word. A gathering of a community to share a space and celebrate. In this case, a community of artists, writers, musicians and thinkers from Birmingham and beyond – Fierce is both determinedly hyperlocal and ambitiously international (and all things in between). Of course there is a wider audience – particularly as much of the work at Fierce over the years has been presented in public spaces; and collaborations with partners such as Warwick Arts Centre, macBirmingham, and DanceXchange lock into their audience bases – but there is a core group of attendees who are fellow artists, creators, and cultural commentators of all sorts.

So this evening is the official launch of Fierce 2015 – although things actually kicked off the night before at Warwick Arts Centre with the opening of the new Chris Goode show Weaklings, which is a corker of a show inspired by the blog of cult writer and artist Dennis Cooper (reviewed here).

At BOM there are all the usual things you’d expect at a festival launch – glasses of fizz, thank-you speeches, hardcore networking – there’s more to it than that, as many of the installation works presented at this year’s Fierce are sited here – so people like me who hate networking and always spend time at launches talking to people they already know can actually see the work being talked about.

One Five West :Code and Carpentry. Photo by Meg Lavender

The basement space has been taken over by Birmingham-based One Five West, whose Code and Carpentry is a ‘series of interactive objects’ encouraging ‘tactile creativity and play in a digital age’. The space has the feel of a fairground sideshow or an old-fashioned games arcade, repossessed and radically altered. Low tech is the name of the game – reclaimed and customised furniture meets schoolboy (or in this case, girl) electronics kit. There are glass-topped boxes on legs (think pinball table) that change colour when you approach them, hall-of-mirrors screens with in-built theremins, and love-seats lit with miniature LED lights that are touch sensitive. When I first enter I’m alone, and enjoy the awareness that I am shaping what I’m seeing and hearing. As the space fills up, there’s a different enjoyment, feeling part of a big moving mechanism of people and machines; everywhere a mash-up of sounds, lights, and shadows with it hard to tell who is instigating what.

Meanwhile upstairs, there’s a screening of Orange Bikini, a film by Emily Mulenga, who uses video and digital art ‘to explore ideas around the (female, Black) body in the Internet age’ . Like One Five West, Emily Mulenga was a Fierce FWD 14 artist – Fierce FWD being a scheme that supports emerging artists from or based in the West Midlands (in Emily’s case, Burton-on-Trent).

In Orange Bikini, Emily’s avatar is seen moving through a series of brightly coloured and fast moving landscapes. It’s somewhere between a girly Disney movie, a Japanese anime, and a quest-based video game – a kaleidoscope of fast-moving mutating landscapes in which our heroine poses, twerks, pole-dances, drives and swims. Here she is shaking her butt in skimpy white shorts and afro hair, a Blaxploitation movie star with a tiny waist and big curves. Now she’s whizzing along a multi-coloured cityscape in her Cobra sports car, long sleek hair streaming in the wind. Then she’s sitting on a tropical beach at sunset, the screen a rainbow of hot orange tones, which shape-shifts into a field of daisies, our heroine sporting My Little Pony pink hair. Next she’s swimming with dolphins, her floating turquoise hair longer than her body. This is a world of unfettered freedom and happiness, in which the self can be anything the artist wants it to be – a body moulded by the mind to absorb, reflect and contradict the oppression of cultural expectations heaped upon young women of colour. Orange Bikini is very lovely piece of work, stating its case for self-determination with humour and joy.

Emily Mulenga: Orange Bikini

Emily’s work can also be seen in the magazine Contemporary Other, which is launched at the Fierce opening. The editor is Demi Nandhra, who is another of the Fierce FWD 14 artists. Contemporary Other is an actual print magazine – hurrah! – 36 A4 pages of quality heavyweight paper with perfect binding. Before I get to any reflection on content, can I say how much this pleases me. What we find inside is creative and critical writing, hand-drawn illustrations and digital artworks. The theme of this launch issue is ‘feminisms’, and the edition includes poetry, poetic prose, manifestos, presentations, essays, and statements – I am Not a Feminist by Zoe Samudzi, and An Open Letter to a Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist, to pick two examples, are provocative and polemical, addressing current issues in contemporary feminism of white supremacy and the acceptance (or otherwise) of transwomen within feminist communities. I’m personally more drawn to the visual arts work, which manages to be strongly political without the polemic. Joiri Minaya’s DWGS postcard series gives us a beautiful collection of portraits that reclaims and updates the sort of imagery used by painters of the ‘exotic’ female form, such as Gauguin. Kamal Badhey’s I Must Remind Myself is a series of photos in which faces or objects are overlaid with texts: a chest-of-drawers with clothes tumbling out bears the words ‘imprints of cruel memories’. Emily Mulenga’s contribution is a photoshopped and digitally enhanced self-portrait – skin made paler, hair changed from black to blonde, waist impossibly slim, breasts ridiculously large, pubic hair airbrushed out. Written on the image are the words ‘the tan lines will fade but the memories will last forever.’

Selina Thompson: Race Cards. Photo Meg Lavender

Key to Emily Mulenga’s work is the notion of a safe space – an idea with a great deal of currency in the debate on ‘contemporary otherness’. It is therefore unsurprising, when entering the room for Selina Thompson’s Race Card installation, to see the phrase ‘safe space’ cropping up numerous times on the 1000 questions she has written and posted all around the walls. Here’s the idea: you enter the room, alone. You read the cards in numerical order, and you stop when you reach one you want to answer. You’re advised to try to pick one that isn’t too easy for you. You write a response and pin it on the wall, so others who enter the room can see your answer. You then pick another question that you can’t answer, and copy that one out on a new card which you take home with you to reflect on.

Here are some of the questions, all of which relate to enquiries around race and cultural identity:

How do you go about exposing white supremacy in liberal arts spaces?

Do you feel comfortable using terms like ‘black’ and ‘white’ to describe race?

What does it mean to be black?

What does it mean to be white?

Whatever happened to multiculturalism?

How can I be more like Grace Jones?

Who is Live Aid for?

What will freedom look like?

When I enter the room, there’s an immediate practical problem in that the early-number questions are up high, written in small and difficult to read script, white on black, set in a dim space – there’s no way I can read them. So I immediately disobey the rules and start reading things in a random order. Inevitably, I spot things that push buttons for me: ‘Who is more problematic, famous racist Nigel Farage, or the liberal journalist politely asking questions?’ promotes a bout of inner rage as I rail against the idea that we can’t ask questions of, or listen to responses from, people we don’t agree with. I decide not to answer that one. I also note ‘Why do we have borders?’, ‘Is immigration traumatic?’ and ‘What will it take to stop Katie Hopkins?’ as they relate so strongly to current work I’m doing with people who have migrated to the UK. Aware that although I’ve been told to take as long as I like, there’s a queue outside, I stop dithering and pick ‘What labels does your body wear?’

Race Cards is a thoughtful and thought-provoking piece of work, but there are flaws in the execution: those up-high cards you can’t read; the fact that you are told to write your reply in red ink, but there is only a black biro available which is confusing; the ‘take as much time as you like’ directive which just makes you feel stressed when there are a load of people waiting outside – I’d prefer a fixed time limit. But these are things that can be easily readjusted. The main thing is the core intention and content of the piece, which is sound and good.

Ria Jade Hartley: Spit Kit. Photo Meg Lavender

The labels my body wears – and whether I accept or reject them – ends up tying in neatly with my experience the next day (also at BOM) of Spit Kit by Bristol-based artist Ria Jade Hartley. In this, you are led into a room upstairs that has been converted into an art-sci laboratory. Vials containing tiny samples of saliva are lined up on shelves, a glass-fronted cabinet contains a selection of scientific and medical instruments, and a number of lines are pegged with photos of human faces and bodies adorned in exotic decorations (white clay, feathers, painted lips…). There is also a wall of pictures of the artist enacting earlier works from the Genetic Body series, of which Spit Kit is the latest strand.

I’m greeted by Ria, invited to sit down, and then presented with the sort of official document we are all familiar with, in which questions of nationality, cultural identity, and race are ascertained. I go for my usual replies: Anglo-Irish. Mixed other. Prefer not to say. We talk about these answers. A sample of saliva is taken, prompting a discussion on DNA testing and ancestry. I’m told my saliva won’t be tested, just added to the museum of samples. I’m asked if I can go back six generations. I can only manage three – parents, grandparents, great-grandparents. This already takes us back to the mid 19th century. Irish. English. Eastern European Jewish. The conversation takes us to a discussion of intermingling cockney London communities, Portuguese sailors arriving in the Irish port of Cork, and the Norman invasion of Hastings. The final stage of the piece leads to me embracing the term I’m happiest with to describe my race, ethnicity, and cultural heritage. I decide on ‘human’ – which is, as well, the only label I was 100% happy for my body to wear in Race Cards. Ria Jade Hartley’s Spit Kit is a great experience – a well-structured, warmly embracing, and thought-provoking work.

Neil Callaghan & Simone Kenyon: Permutations in the City

Meanwhile, on the streets of Birmingham, Permutations in the City continues its investigation of movement in public spaces, partly choreographed and partly improvised around a structure, and inspired by Stefan Jovanovic’s provocation: How can bodies be used to alter the social scripts inherent in public space? Friday is day two for choreographers Neil Callaghan and Simone Kenyon and their team of guest dancers. On Thursday, I watched two of them work their way around the grimy urban environment of a motorway underpass. Although the movement work was fine – simple, slow encounters between two bodies negotiating their way along the inside edge of the boundary wall – I felt a little bored. Partly, I think, because I have seen so many choreographic works in cities that seemed to have an identical intention. (Although I realise that I am very old, and have seen a lot, and that young artists need to feel that they can discover things for themselves.)

I have quite a different reaction on Friday, when I see another pair of dancers in the busy Victoria Square in the city centre. Here, the piece is less about a response to urban architecture, and more about the social space. In the underpass, the dancers negotiating the concrete walls and floor were watched by a few Fierce aficionados, with an occasional passer-by scurrying past uninterested. It seemed a pretty insular affair focused on the bodies’ relationship to the physical environment. In the square, there are people who are here to enjoy the autumn sunshine, to take a cigarette break, leaving their offices for a take-away coffee, or sitting on a bench with a lover. People who become slowly or suddenly aware of the two figures standing still and leaning against each other. There is a strength in the fact that the dancer’s bodies are locked in to each other, with movements mostly a slow and cautious embrace and unwinding. A pair of builders walk by looking a little bemused, glancing back over their shoulders; a group of charity workers stop their drill when they realise they have competition; a man asleep on a bench with a copy of the Sun over his face sits up to ask me if I know ‘what that’s all about’. As is oft the way with work in public spaces, I enjoy watching the incidental audience as much as I enjoy watching the performers. ‘But what’s the point?’ says the Sun reader. Just being there, doing it, is the point, I feel.

The performers unlock their hold and walk off, moving off to their next site. Sadly, my time is up and I have to go too, to head for the train station. I leave Birmingham regretfully, knowing that I will be missing a fabulous weekend of work that will include terrific new shows by Ursula Martinez, Fernando Belfiore, and Kate MacIntosh. I’ll miss the Saturday night Club Fierce featuring not only Gazelle Twin but also Miguel Gutierrez. I won’t get to bring my own record to Montreal company PME–ART’s Bring Your Own Record Listening Party. I won’t get to Sleep with a Curator. I’ve missed my chance to see Tim Etchell’s neon Will Be – in which the words The Future Will Be Confusing will shine out from the historic frontage of the Moseley Road Baths, a foreshadowing of which was seen at Chris Goode’s Weaklings, which ends on those very same words. A zeitgeist thing, or are they in collusion?

This is the last year that Fierce will be curated and directed by Laura McDermott and Harun Morrison. The call is out for a new artistic director – and we can only hope that whoever takes up the post brings as much verve, energy, and ambition to the job as these two, who now move off into their own futures, confusing or otherwise. What will be for Fierce Festival in the future we shall have to wait and see.

Tim Etchells: Will Be

Featured photo (top of page): Emily Mulenga Orange Bikini. Photo courtesy of artist.

Fierce is an international festival of cross artform performance centred in Birmingham. The festival embraces theatre, dance, music, installations, activism, digital practices and parties. Fierce fills the city with performances in theatres, galleries and other out-of-the-ordinary spaces. Fierce 2015 took place 7–11 October. www.wearefierce.com

Dorothy Max Prior attended Fierce for Total Theatre 7–8 October 2015.

Mahogany Opera Group: Folie à Deux

Production company Unlimited have turned this London staging of Mahogany Opera’s new piece – as part of the Totally Thames festival – into something of an event. There’s a river boat to whisk us over to the lighthouse at Trinity Buoy Wharf for the performance, Icelandic beer, street food, alcoholic popsicles… once we’re there, the trouble is, apart from the long queue for a hamburger, there’s not much to do or see while we wait, quite a long time, for the 45-minute piece itself to start. The wraparound feels like an exercise in indulging corporate sponsorship rather than anything artistically related to the piece.

Things pick up once the show starts. Emily Hall’s new opera-cum-concept album (a concept not without its problems), with words by Sjón (a regular Björk collaborator), is a set of songs that plunge us into the strange situation of a couple whose relationship comes adrift as he becomes obsessed with the electricity pylon outside their house, and she is gradually dragged into his delusions. Along with two singers, accompaniment is provided by harp and keyboard, and a new instrument, the electro-magnetic harp, which produces long, sustained notes to play the role of the pylon itself. The singers are miked throughout, which is slightly alienating in such an intimate performance, but allows for various echoing and delay effects and the blend with the acoustic instruments and Mira Calix’s recorded beats. The songs themselves are beautiful, with lavish melodies and rich, quirky, emotive texts convincingly sung by soprano Sofia Jernberg and tenor Finnur Bjarnason over shimmering and haunting folk-electronic accompaniment.

As a stage performance, it’s very coolly directed, Felix Wake-Walker’s staging (barring a bit of vague and underwhelming gestural work) essentially comprising careful and dynamic placing of the two singers in relation to the space and each other, while Dan Large’s monochrome projections – lines, dashes, light and darkness – flicker and flow across them. All of this elegantly frames each mood and number.

But it feels as though a little too much of the show is still stuck in the ‘concept album’ part of the deal. Hall deliberately created an opera without recitative – it feels unsurprisingly more like a song cycle – and the songs carry us into the centre of each of a sequence of high-feeling moments without much surrounding narrative, or clear momentum through the story. Which is all very well, but somehow unsatisfying, and after the performance, slightly confused, I looked up some of Hall’s intentions, and she has talked about working with psychologists at the Maudsley to research folie à deux (a rare psychotic disorder where one person’s symptoms are transferred to another) and about the narrative surrounding the songs – whole backstories of the characters and specific transformative events in their story and relationship – but the strange thing is that really very little of this essential detail is evident in the piece, either in the music, lyrics, or the stripped-down staging, all of which are undermined by being more concerned with emotional responses to these events that we don’t quite get. And therefore, although working perhaps as an album, as a stage show it feels (and the rigmarole surrounding this performance amplified rather than alleviated this) pretentious, wilfully impenetrable, unnecessarily (if unintentionally) detached: a shame, as there’s something very lovely, and very potent, buried in here.

Platform 4: Memory Point(s)

Six audience members – no more, no less – are led through a side entrance of the Queen Elizabeth Hall: a Jenga tower of concrete blocks piled between the Southbank and Waterloo Bridge. We are informed that our tour of the building will be the last to see the Purcell Room as we know it, which is already closed for refurbishment for two years. Platform 4 is the last company to present work here in a fitting celebration of the past and how we hold on to it, in promenade installation piece Memory Point(s) (intriguingly, the show is itself the subject of memory having previous been presented here in 2014).

Having spent many an interval in the shared foyer of the Purcell Room and QEH, there is a definite sense of the grandiose in its monumental features. The complex, designed by Hubert Bennett, is imposing, formed mainly of wood, concrete, and marble. It is made grand by its austerity, all clean lines and minimal embellishment. Memory Point(s), which is addressing one challenge for site responsive work by touring a production first made for a very different place in 2012, overturns this heavy brutalist architecture by relocating pockets of the personal and private into the QEH’s blunt interior.

Tonight a tiny corner of the foyer is home to somebody’s living room, perhaps my own, perhaps not. I have a designated leather chair and headset. It could be my postcards and sea shells in the cabinet before us but the photos speak their own story. Portraits of another couple, another tine, another place. With composer Pete Flood’s (Bellowhead) richly evocative soundscape filling our ears, we are guided through the building’s darkness and desolation to pockets of warm, inviting mini-habitats created by designer Su Houser. My winding journey towards a celebratory hiatus has moments of wonder and agency as I dress up in frills, choose sweets from a seaside doll’s house made out of an old wooden desk, and unlock a locker full of tiny installations like a post-modern Joseph Cornell exhibit. The dressing of the sites, performers, and audience is sumptuous, perfumed and wonderful, like the holidays in the photographs and postcards that I rifled through in the desk.

A 50s female and a chap in a tailcoat play a dual role of leading us through the building and through what appears to be their own memories together; their jollity is comforting but perhaps unnecessary, and as the tour progresses their function becomes less clear. They weave together content created from the experiences of a variety of people affected by dementia (the show has been produced in collaboration with the Alzheimers Society). Montages of disparate memories collected from members of the Southampton and Eastleigh Connections Club and Singing for the Brain are constructed in dressing rooms, through windows, on staircases and emergency exits. Each creation is set apart from the next and separated by the time it takes to get there as our tour guide pretends to forget the way or leads us down dead ends – a lovely spatial metaphor for misfires of memory. There is, however, room to add more content here and consider how one scene might transform the experience of the next. There is also potential to drop the guides altogether and allow the audio in our headphones and the live soundscape of the piece to interact more directly.

The reconstruction of memories dislocates them in place and time and effectively disorientates the viewer both in terms of narrative and geography of the space. A reconnection with the building about to be lost is achieved via a clever depiction of a memory revisited in varying pieces and details. It is of a moment on holiday, under umbrellas, with cabaret singing and a musical act. I hear the music from behind glass, I see a musician. I observe a photograph of the scene in what I am sure is the auditorium here but I can’t be sure until I find myself there under those very umbrellas creating the memory for myself. Blurring the boundaries between original fittings and installations is where the piece is at its most interesting.

Memory Point(s) explores unobserved lives and places and situates us directly within the narrative – the installations create pasts and futures that incorporate the audience fully. However, the work is at risk of being overshadowed by the gravity of the QEH. Thought this is site specific immersive theatre, there is space for Memory Point(s) to take more risks and bring itself up to date with contemporary explorative site work. Allowing the space greater influence on the physical, and therefore artistic, journey would empower its potential for transformation – of itself and us. Memory Point(s) begins to do this but leaves a sense of emptiness, a sense that both the QEH and the authors of the memories have more to say and perhaps this is a symptom of re-working a site responsive piece into a new place after its conception and run at The Point, Eastleigh.

After we all dance on the stage with a merry band of frolicking musicians and pose for photographs, dancer Hayley Barker unfurls and hangs from the lighting box ladder and treads the wooden façade of the boundaries of the auditorium. Rebounding back and forth like a pendulum in a flurry of emotions and turning with an invisible partner, Barker ends the show as it is just beginning. Her emotive expressions embody a sense of loss, heightened in its contrast to the nature of the rest of the work where images one step removed – held behind glass, in a frame, shrunk into a tiny dolls house or locked in a locker – dominate. Even when the fourth wall is entirely broken and we prepare to make our costumed debut on stage there is a surreal disconnect between audience and performer. An effective metaphor for the disassociation of fragmented memory, perhaps, but it is a welcome relief here when Barker finally breaks this with an honest and human response, walking away to leave me wondering who she is and what she means to me.