Charlie Morrissey & Scott Smith, Instructions for Survival

Review in Issue 17-2 | Summer 2005

Charlie Morrissey and Scott Smith stroll into the performance space – at first passively confronting each other, two everymen. Then, through a series of body dialogues they demonstrate how we survive the smaller and greater circumstances of our lives in relation to ourselves. They explore intimate relationships and relationships to the world at large. Within a slate-grey desert-like landscape and with wonderful lighting which reveals, conceals, highlights, divides and completes, the performers invent physical instructions for their own survival – sink or swim – with a beauty, a masculinity, an everydayness exuding a vulnerable strength and relaxed magnificence as opponents, comrades, protectors, fallen heroes, defenders... people. The most riveting dance/physical movement episode saw Scott Smith wrapped around Charlie Morrissey's waist like a swathe of humanity, falling and finding his liberty on the ground, his solitude floundering – searching through gravity and perpetually turning, melting, twisting and reforming. This was pure, unadulterated, powerful performance – from the poised eternal of the real/true starting moment right through to the end when both men stroll out of the space.

Presenting Venue
Date Seen
  1. Feb 2005

This article in the magazine

Issue 17-2
p. 28