Leeway, a work in progress

In a time when our connection to and sense(s) of place are being radically altered by political and technological developments, especially as we navigate between real and virtual worlds, I am obsessed with a desire to develop new maps and locations of belonging and resiliency through creative interaction.

Leeway will include text, choreographed movement, video projection and sound design to create an interactive world featuring five performers who have been transported to the place where the audience finds them. They are outcasts, expulsed, adrift looking for a way to proceed, to find some sense of terra firma. Throughout the course of the performance we hear different fragments of stories about displacement in different voices, real and virtual.  

As diverse performers interact and replace each other strands of narrative are revealed in fragments – broken off parts of a lost whole. Images, gestures, parts of a melody appear, coalesce into momentary configurations, change course, are destroyed and rewoven into new renditions and patterns. 

From a world of disparate sounds, movements and images moments of congruence begin to appear in the environment. Performers and media begin to share and repeat the same (or analogous) images, gestures or sounds – to share a similar vocabulary of resolve and collaboration and construct a more unified space that can be sustained.  

The desire with this project is to forge a coherent story/place from fragmented multiple memories – to chart a newly created course through unfamiliar terrain. I also like to imagine this piece as a kind of incantation. From diverse voices telling similar stories of leaving and arriving, expulsion and recovery, an underlying sense of design and belonging is evoked or summoned.