Upon The Place Beneath, devised by Claudia Kappenberg with Lost Parade (Clara Garcia-Fraile, Lori O’Regan, Johanna Ronkko, Chloe Ducharne, Anna Watts, Sarah Alexander)
Performed at: Scratch the Surface, Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin and Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray, Eire (2008); Soundwaves Festival , University of Brighton, UK (2008); The Eagle Document: The New Collection of Enumerated Things at The Stephen Lawrence Gallery, University of Greenwich, Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich, London, (2009).
The piece is a performed sonic exploration of the entropic.
The work brings together a collection of objects and materials from the everyday with a minimal choreography inspired by Beckett's insistence on the almost nothing. Six performers stand in black buckets, each one in amongst different sets of vessels such as ceramic pots, small and large cans, series of plastic tubs or drums. Each performer wears a rimed hat. To begin with the performers sway gently in their buckets but gradually the movement increases in rigor and small pods such as beans, peas and rice begin to fall from the rims of their hats onto the vessels below, creating a orchestra of sounds and rhythms. Crouching into their buckets and reaching between their feet the performers add the sound of water splashing to the general cacophony. Eventually they step out of their buckets and one by one walk away from the scene.
Alluding to Francis Bacon's studio, which has been reconstructed in the Hugh Lane Gallery, the performance lets the banal, ad hoc and chaotic take their place amongst the permanent, stable and fixed.
"Everyone seemed gripped - it looked beautiful..."
(Irish Times - www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/features/2008/1119/1227026408193.html)
