We’re making our first schools edition of Building of spines this November for Compass Festival
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We’re making our first schools edition of Building of spines this November for Compass Festival
An installation for one person at a time, an eight and a half minute journey in total darkness, provoking imagined landscapes and narratives, confronting the discovering or rediscovering its fears and joys of being in the dark..
“I wanted to investigate how far it was possible to create a narrative that existed only in the audience member’s head. I wanted to play with the idea of fear and move beyond it. At the time I created Something… I had recently been diagnosed with MS, experiencing lots of problems with my sight and was terrified of losing it altogether.
Prior to making Something… I had worked with Enrique Vargas and Teatro de los Sentidos over 3 years so the form was immediately where I began to work. It was only later the term immersive theatre was coined.
There were no words used in the dark, no visual clues - our other senses were explored, especially sound and smell. I planted various objects in the dark space, specific for me, evocative in another story for the audience: grass, a jacket that smelled of the stables, warm sand and more. What the audience choose to engage with and where they took their narratives were entirely their own choice. A performer inhabited the darkness kept the visitor company when necessary.
As the piece matured and responded to every location, I had lost my fear of the dark and became more interested in the challenges of its construction, the functionality, the mechanics that underlay its poetics.
Renny O’Shea, director
