premiering 27/02/2021 a short film on the theme of ‘Liveness’ for Newcastle University Performance Research Department. Captions can be enabled in youtube.

My Heart Cannot Hear Yours From Here

A yellow social distance floor marker circle with the words ’ please keep your distance, thank you for practicing social distancing’ and a black and white outline of two stylized people and a double headed arrow between them which has 2m above it.

Humans ‘know’ that we are alive, as we breathe and sense the other in same space/time/place. Our species is tribal and collective. Like most mammals we seek to associate in groups and we communicate and sense via Heart Connection (electro-cardiac impulses) - perceiving the other within a critical 3 feet of our hearts - and co-regulating to the nervous system of one another.

Science validates this powerful, unspoken resonance. It’s why we seek out gathering - to connect and to feel part of; alive and whole. All other communication is secondary; The body feels relationship - proximity - and commands the brain against reason or logic to defer to ‘sense’. Being together matters because without heart connection we start to feel bereft; without reference point or sense of human agency-in-community. We are compelled to find resonance in space and time and place to feel real.

The voiced expression of this connection - this liveness - this mutuality of experience - is story. And story sustains us, but it cannot replace the felt sense of temporal and spatial proximity. Collective bodily experiencing.

The filmed group experienced live-ness then as pure connection (other sense redundant). Before story; In the beginning. The viewer here is left free to create story from the visual - there are no imposed clues or caveats. Viscerally, the watching soma in this iteration is not in that screened live-ness and feels the frailty of secondary sensing.

I wrote FU on her back (chalk is dust but lotion sinks)

Skin, sun lotion, chalk and cloth.

A series of photographs. Selfies. skin, sun lotion, chalk and cloth.

Referencing ideas of public shaming and retribution, but also accountability and ownership. (These images also reference an episode in my own life - 20 years ago now)

Lines of chalk on a board to instil learning. Crimes etched in skin. Police mugshots. Masking our true nature or identity. What can be brushed off like dust and what sinks into our skin indelibly?  What happens if we subvert the protective qualities of lotion that covers our skin, or of skin itself?

How can we understand what ally-ship is? What does it mean to take ownership of our own actions and the consequences of them? How do we enact justice in our lives and who do we offer peace and belonging to?  What do we insist is worn publicly and what may be hidden or brushed off? Who is allowed to hide and who do we expose?

Theatre as Organism