A Walk Between - update

Following feedback from our scratch we have been thinking about what steps need to be taken next in the final five weeks before our show. Also, we are looking for a director and in order to describe what we are doing and what our piece is about, Tania and I have written a synopsis for A Walk Between.

A Walk Between - Synopsis

A walk between is a site-specific devised performance to be performed in the garden of Southside House, Wimbledon Common. The piece was inspired initially by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities in which the explorer Marco Polo describes all the places he has seen on his travels to the emperor Kublai Khan in a very visually rich language. It is in the Khan’s palace garden that all these places are described, coming together and are transported to an entirely new place. We were interested by the idea of bringing outside places in, in particular to a garden, a place that is neither outside or inside, surrounded by walls, but of a house, and in doing so, questioning what is real – the places we are in the present, the places we speak of – how can we adequately describe where we have been? That the places Marco Polo describes are seemingly far-ranging and diverse cities, but are in fact all descriptions of his home-town of Venice, is fundamental to the concept of the piece. How places can be contained in the mind, and transformed by each other through memory, and description is something we wish to explore.
It is a promenade performance where the audience are able to move freely throughout the garden and choose the length of time that they engage with it, and choose what they want to see, and how to interact with it – some might choose to sit for a while, and read some of the text that we have used as inspiration and put in to a booklet, some might want to engage with the various actors performing in various places in the garden.
There are two main characters. The traveller character is a character from the outside, a character of this time period, who has been travelling for a long time and in her suitcase brings stories of the places she has seen and the people she has met. All of these stories seem to link in to one another as the characters create a story – an old man waiting for letters from his daughter, the postman on a boat taking letters to the port…a letter to a mother in times of war. The traveller moves through the garden telling her stories at specific points, leaving behind traces – this might be objects from the outside or we have experimented with creating words that question her stories on postcards placed on the grass. We have talked about the possibility of her searching for something or someone from the past in the garden – perhaps she has been here before or perhaps she has heard of it somehow. It may be that she is searching for the garden character….. We need a thread to tie everything together so are wondering if the traveller is perhaps researching or writing about the history of Southside house and is therefore travelling there to see where all the characters from its history are located.
The second main character is going to be represented via alternative means to an actor. The garden character is inspired partly by the minotaur in Borge’s story House of Asterion (Labyrinths), who is trapped in the labyrinth, but according to him, by free-will and partly by a past inhabitant of Southside house who loved her garden so much that she would not leave during the first world war, despite the fact that the house was bombed twice, and her soldier son’s pleading letters to her to relocate to the countryside. We decided to represent her through alterior means other than an actor – i.e. through text (projected/printed) or the leaving behind of objects that hint at her present. We have also experimented with recorded sound on cd players and Dictaphones and are we are thinking this could all be the same voice spread throughout the garden to create a better sense of her. In our scratch it was felt that she was not evident enough throughout the garden but rather was located specifically in the temple area where a projection with dancing text, a pair of shoes and a voice recording speaking about her garden, came together. It is necessary that her presence is felt more for this piece to reflect our original intentions.
We want to develop the idea of the two main characters meeting somehow, not necessarily physically but the traveller’s awareness of her for example, and creating a tension between their contrasting time periods and locations.
In addition we also have devised a number of repetitive actions, some inspired by things one does in a garden and others by the stories the traveller delivers – for example, the de-petalling of flowers, the re-arranging of a miniature wooden city, the hanging of tissue-paper with handwritten text on a washing line. Four or five actors will perform these actions. These characters are meant as a link between the two worlds and the two main characters. They sit on the wall between the inside and the outside. Whilst their actions may be of a garden environment perhaps, an eccentricity gives an edge. Perhaps the actor arranging chairs and tables for a dinner party could invite audience members to sit down and eat with him. Perhaps it is through these characters that the story of the garden character is unravelled. Southside House has a great history where numerous important historical characters, kings and queens, the lovers of important militia men, actors etc. stayed, or were sheltered for various reasons.
We are thinking about a durational piece – maybe two to three hours, where the atmosphere becomes almost party-like, and the audience becomes relaxed enough to engage with the performers and with each other. It is about entering in to a world and feeling immersed in it. We would like the audience to consider the duality of the outside and inside worlds. How our memories of places affect our present experience, how new places can be created within another place through storytelling….
At the same time we do not want it to become so relaxed that any tension created by the narrative disperses. We have to moderate the behaviour of the audience somehow.

Things to work on:

- Finding the points of tension in the narrative to maintain the audience’s interest and it not to become just a pretty promenade piece. What is the audience questioning? What are we making them think about?
- Enhancing the sense of the garden character. Developing her story and the meeting point between her and the traveller. Creating a link between her and the actions – they might reference her somehow.
- Raising awareness of the wall as a partition between the outside and the inside. This duality of the outside and the inside is a key idea of the piece and we wish to convey this. The garden as an outside area enclosed by walls is something that needs to be emphasised.
- Finding alternative ways of inserting text in to the garden, rather than on white paper. In the scratch we placed fragments of a poem about a garden printed on to paper on the ground, near the flowerbeds, surrounded by leaves, but it was felt that this was too imposing and the audience didn’t really read it. Text as a visual is a key area of Tania’s research and this needs to be achieved somehow. We also want the audience to be aware of the texts that have inspired us and we have drawn from. We need to invistigate natural materials that text can be placed on or text as a sound – we used a Dictaphone in the scratch, recording speech and passing it around and response to this was positive.
- Thinking about the documentation – are we going to have an exhibition space at the beginning of the garden with the postcards and photos etc. displayed in an exhibition manner? This follows from out desire to make the audience aware of the collecting and research period to the project.
- Overcome an uneasiness about the traveller character just delivering a monologue. Maybe this is fine, but we want to investigate the possibility of her interacting with the other characters in the garden, as it is through them that she finds out about the garden character, and the importance of this garden.