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| Reviews of the performances and the costumes |
Now this is an unusual experience. Shocked. Moved.
Saddened. Calmed. Enlightened. Freaked out. Whatever you feel after this
promenade performance around Brompton Cemetery, you are bound to feel something.
Scampi Productions presents Ghost Letters, based
upon the powerful poetry of American Richard McCann. On arrival one
does not know what to expect. Wandering around a graveyard at dusk,
thoughts naturally turn to death – but as the performance gently
and unexpectedly begins, one is drawn into a haunted world which is
both living and dying. The recited verse explains how and why we’re
inextricably linked to the two.
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Nicola Dahlinger and Vanessa
Mildernberg thoughfully direct and creatively choreograph eight
performers lead by Thomas Thoroe, who delivers the poetry with it’s
deserved passion and energy. Meanwhile the chorus’ use of
movement and mime is surprisingly chilling. |
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The actors work as one moving body as they beckon
their audience deeper into examining the cycle of feelings released when
a loved one is lost.
The audience forms an integral part of the piece.
We don’t sit down. Instead, we are constantly invited to follow
the performers into different parts of the cemetery. Bodies appear from
nowhere while the beat of the verse builds to a touching climax. This
truly beautiful poetry leaves no emotion unturned. “What are we
but ghosts if we don’t touch?” asks McCann. One cannot help
beginning to question our most natural communication.
Jane Stead: Fulham
& Hammersmith Chronicle, Thurs Aug 19 1999 |
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| The work reminds one of another German artist: Joseph Beuys.
Beuys magical story of rescue during World War II and his subsequent
use of felt and fat as material for his sculptures are known
to have complex metaphorical associations, among them a sense
of protection and survival. Sendler’s muffled world of
fibre creates a similar poetic protection from the realities
of day to day emotional and auditory exposure. And much like
Sendler’s interior skins, Beuys’ is quoted with
explaining that, “The outward appearance of every object
I make is equivalent of some aspect of inner human life.” |
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The unsettling emotion conveyed by these works
in reminiscent of an environment described by late Japanese author
Kawabata Yasunari in his short story “One Arm.”
On an unusual night Yasunari’s main character imagines
that he hears the following radio warning: “because of the
wet branches and their own wet feet and wings, small birds have
fallen to the ground and cannot fly. |
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Automobiles passing through the parks should
take care not to run over them. And if a warm wind comes up,
the fog will perhaps change color. Strange-colored fogs are
noxious. Listeners should therefore lock their doors if the
fog should turn pink or purple.” Sendler’s performers
would likely have seemed at ease in this strange fog. Here
the felted costumes present a strange tension between a sense
of being smothered and that of being swaddled, a world where
beauty could as likely be magical as sinister.
Jessica Hemming: Selvedge
textile magazine
issue no 03 Sept /Oct 2004 |
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These costumes
was later shown in 'Felt, Felt, Felt', a European Touring Exhibition
and now form part of the permanent collection of the Crafts Museum
of Central Finland, Javascula, Finland
"Wool seemed
to be the ideal natural material to merge the group of 'Dead Souls'
with the environment of the cemetery."
Jeanette
Sendler |
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Richard McCann’s garrulous elegy to a lover
who died of AIDS is delightfully upstaged by the faded overgrown
Georgian grandeur of Brompton Cemetery. Weaving between the wonky,
ivy covered gravestones and through the arches of the enveloping
colonades of the Great Circle, Thomas Thoroe plays a poet recounting
the anguished loss of a loved one. The story takes us into seedy
back-streets for early sexual encounters, into depersonalised hospitals
in the vain battle for life and off on anguished drinking binges
in the wake of the inevitable bereavement. |
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Informing this narrative are the themes of touching
and breathing, leading to fantasised reunion with the loved one and
releasing the narrator back out of the underworld. |
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Whether or not McCann’s Poetry actually succeeds
in rising from the tomb of it’s highly personalised anguish,
there is more to this performance than just the language. Nicola Dahlinger’s
promenade production had a chorus of seven mummified actors dressed
up in mouldy white felt appearing like wailing banshees from the surrounding
crypts, drifting through the graveyard like ghosts and acting as a
supernatural cortege. |
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But the elements too have their part to play in
the creation of the transient atmosphere: planes lining up for Heathrow
overhead, wind rustling in the trees, armies of barking crows, the
smell of the earth and the shadows lengthening in the setting sun.
Thoroe is sometimes over-emphatic in his desire to match the intensity
of McCann’s often impenetrable, occasionally banal poetry.
But whatever one’s private response, the event itself is a
great pretext for indulging melancholy emotions of one’s own,
recollected in the tranquillity of this beautiful cemetery.
Patrick Marmion: Time
Out August 1999 |
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| Following the success
of the performance in Brompton Cemetery, London, it was performed
in the Friedhoefe vor dem Halleschen Tor, Berlin, 2001 as Ghost
Letters II. |
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| Please visit www.emergingproperties
.de to learn more about the performances Ghost Letters I-IV |
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60a High Street
Newburgh, Fife
Scotland KY14 6AQ |
email: Jeanette
landline: 01337 841004
mobile: 07813 023607 |
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