YOU’VE GOT MY BACK, AND I’M ON YOUR SIDE | 2015
Initially commissioned by Grand Union Gallery and performed at Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea as part of 'The Bear Pit' Residency, 2015
Re-iteration commissioned by le FRAC Champagne-Ardenne
DUET
Alice: What’s your position?
Heather: I forget
Alice: Your position?
Heather: Yes. Sometimes I forget
Alice: Where to go? And supposed to be?
Heather: And how to hold myself
Alice: With your own arms
Heather: No it’s just not the same
Alice: It’s difficult to carry yourself?
Heather: Alone yes
Alice: Your own weight
Heather: Yes
Alice: It’s too heavy alone
Heather: And I’d have no ground to stand on.
Alice: No ground for your position
Heather: No
Alice: You’d need help to do that
Heather: Yes, help
REPEAT
Production still, Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea, 2015
You've got my back and I'm on your side
10 minute edit of 21 minute performance documentation from Focal Point, Southend-on-Sea.
Performers:
Alice Theobald
Soprano: Heather Collier
Voice from the Audience: Michael Garrad and Dan Bolger
Also previously with translation by John Bloomfiled
10 minute edit of 21 minute performance documentation from Focal Point, Southend-on-Sea.
Performers:
Alice Theobald
Soprano: Heather Collier
Voice from the Audience: Michael Garrad and Dan Bolger
Also previously with translation by John Bloomfiled
Working with Soprano Singer Heather Collier, You’ve got my back and I’m on your side is a performance that mutates in response to space and context and resists narrative through dislocated imagery and repetition to allow for a nonsense, circular quality to emerge.
The piece uses layered wordplay, double-entendres, gesture and music and accumulate to multi-faceted compositions that reflect and loop back on themselves. Whilst simultaneously referencing its own production and being the ‘the production’ itself, language becomes slippery and unstable presenting tragicomic truths about relationships, the drama of everyday life and typically introspective paranoia and doubts.
You’ve got my back and I’m on your side was originally developed on The Bear Pit residency at Focal Point Gallery in Southend, UK, drawing from research on ‘The Theatre of the Absurd’ a term coined by critic Martin Esslin in a 1960 essay. The term references a style of theatre associated with the work of a group of playwrights in the late 1950s, which cohered with philosopher Albert Camus’ existentialist view that the human situation is essentially absurd in its struggle to find purpose and to control its fate.
