TREADING WATER
1998
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This was a site specific piece commissioned for the The Quay Thing - a festival of site specific work in Exeter organised by 'Wrights and Sites'.

We spent a month working with Ross Mullen, Jane McGinnes, Millie Taylor and Charlotte Hawkins, in a condemned boatyard on Exeter Quay.

The piece was concerned with how the history of a site is constructed as much from lies and fictions as from historical truths. We were also fascinated with the process through which real working enviroments are scrapped and replaced with sanitised facsimiles for the easier enjoyment of visitors and incomers.
We used text from Henrik Ibsen's "Enemy of the People" - along with many layers of stories, anecdotes and lies about the place collected during the residency.

floating tv

The piece was perfomed at dusk and included video and slide projections - mostly showing text - projected onto wrecked boats, tarpaulins, scrap wood and metal from around the site.
We used a tonne of old books - creating random text for the perfomers to work with during the improvised sections. We also used songs layered with various other found sounds and music. There was also a landrover and a rowing boat used for getting the performers away from the site quickly in the final moments or the performance.

Site specific work allows you to incorporate the unplanned and volitile events of real places and make them part of the experience. Treading Water ended with two performers leaving in a boat and the other three roaring out of the space in a landrover taking most of the kit with them and leaving the audience alone in the dark. On the first night, seconds after the landrover had left, a huge lowflying aeroplace taking off from a nearby airport flew directly over the site. Several people thought we'd planned it ........


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The complex layers of sound and stories existed within a structure supplied by the text from the Enemy of the People --- the performers acted out six edited scenes from the play which provided moments of stylised theatricality.