Fifty years on from my first Award, and with that many years experience in literary work, performance and theatre, I now face the most challenging project of all. To create a theatre-piece which will contain, evoke and enact that which most threatens us. We face losses so profound they lie beyond our ability to hold such totality in consciousness, a container both robust and fragile.
Millions are without HOME. We who know of it see the risk to human identity – theirs, but also ours. Perhaps only art can trawl and capture such immensity. Marx said it in 1844. Laban’s Green Clowns said it in 1920.
The Gospel According to Mary (ENO 2015), with its multiple layers – sang, played, danced and spoke it through the collaboration of John Adams and Peter Sellars. Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s Puz/zle (Sadlers Wells, April 2013) – ‘Stone, elemental, the slowest element, the play of flesh and matter, entombed, released….’ I YOU WE THEM, ground-breaking work by Dan Gretton, forthcoming from William Heinemann.
What is HOME? Millions sleep in mud across Europe and beyond. There may be a flicker of HOME in a single gesture. They may be living in the wide air, but are as confined and tortured as any incarceration.
What is home under a government so ignorant and self-obsessed, they cannot grasp even the simplest human need – IDENTITY, PERSONHOOD, A NAME. We have seen it seventy-five years ago, when whole populations were ‘pieces’ to be packed, transported, eliminated.
Children and grandchildren with no ancestry. Or no future. Or being primed to relinquish their senses, spacial awareness, human connection. The lie of technology’s promise.
Do you know the statistics for use of tablets by one to three-year-olds? Or the sharp rise in psychological and mental disorder among those for whom the number of ‘hits’ on their selfies controls their sense of identity and ability to function?
Bring into the same focus the millions of stateless, desperate people, bodies in the shop doorways of my home town and the millions of isolated humans trawling the internet for a connection, any kind of ‘hit’.
Destruction begins a long time before extinction.
Asylum, my novel, has scenarios calling out to be brought into relationship. In its entirety, the book is a world-stage. Hester and Mariamne play out the double-edged sword of the spoiled and the deprived. Exaggerated action, a yawning emptiness.
There are a dozen ways this text could be brought to performance. Across this site, you will find many elements ready for use. The profoundly human exhibition 1001caps – Un Poema Visual is a hymn to humanity in itself. No effort is needed to use this human congregation as a setting for music, voice, word, dance – enactment using all or any of these.
Behold – the Event is my testament to what is possible. I want now to gather a new company of players, to present a further unique theatrical form. Based on Asylum or extracts from it. Incubus – or parts of it.
The urgency of this lies alongside the need for caution in that urgency. I have the vision, but also the nuts and bolts, the training, the practise.
Also a very real possibility of funding.