I have not performed my own work in a while - I’ve taken a year
out from my own performance practice. At first, I was avoiding situations where
people would ask me what I am doing, what I am making, what the next project is
- because for along time I felt like I would never want to make or perform
again – and the loss of that impulse was too hard to speak of or even find
words to explain.
I made my first solo piece, Are You Lonesome Tonight? at the end of 2014 as part of Now14
festival at the Yard Theatre and was lucky enough to perform it many times in
2014. It was due to tour and I was arranging the making of my next project.
Then my sibling passed away whilst in psychiatric care of respiratory pneumonia
and since I’ve been unsure whether I would be able to return to Are You
Lonesome Tonight? or my practice.
AYLT uses a specific moment from my personal history – the moment
when my sibling, whilst experiencing a period of psychosis, gave me a book
titled Are You Lonesome
Tonight? the untold story of Elvis’s one true love and the child he never knew and told me this book was about me and
I am the secret love child of Elvis - as a starting point for my research
enquiry.
I wanted to better understand what psychosis is and
how it is defined, using Elvis, his music and image as a cipher with which to ask – what is the difference between an imaginative thought and a
delusional belief? What are the parameters by which we patholigise behaviour
we don’t understand and ask why some ideas from some people are allowed and others are not? I
still want to ask these questions, they are still important, still
relevant and so I will be performing Are You Lonesome Tonight? in it’s new form on Saturday
30th April at the Attenborough Arts Centre in Leicester. I was lucky to
be supported by Word of Warning, Domestic 11 in
September 2015 to experiment with this new form and to them I am
incredible grateful.
I am the beginning of an inquest process for my siblings death-
it’s been a year of dates being set and moved, witnesses’s outside of
jurisdiction, evidence being misplaced and what feels like endless Kafkaesque
stalling. All this amidst grieving, healing and beginning to return to shared
reality.
The Hillsborough Inquest is an example of just how long it
takes for the truth to come out, for those really responsible to be held
accountable, for justice - I
hope this particular inquest is catalyst for a further enquiry into the
government and state violence, police brutality and the media who so
shamelessly promoted hatred and lies through their position of power about the
victims of the Hillsborough devastation.
I am in the midst of something that feels so much bigger than me.
In the last year I have had the honour of being around SistersUncut who
give me strength to carry on. My practice is part of that activism; I will not
be silenced, I will take up space and facilitate space for your voices to be
listened to.
Revisiting this piece has been like putting on an old coat that
doesn't fit the same as it used to. My body has changed shape and so the coat
had to be adjusted, some buttons moved, the lining re-hemmed, but there is a
comfort in this coat beyond sentimentality. I want to honour the memory of my
sibling and the drive to make this piece. I’m putting my coat back on and
returning to my practice.
