Tuesday 10 June 2008

Untitled at Holy Hiatus, an introduction

untitled

Maura Hazelden & Louise Laurens

Small World Theatre
Thursday 22nd May 4 – 6.45pm 7.15 – 10.30pm

At any one time there will only be six audience members. The amount of time spent experiencing the work is up to the individual. There is a place to wait comfortably!


There is no aim to over push the body; the endurance is more of mind and spirit, a journey to feel what happens. The possibility of transformation, boredom or despair… It could easily be considered a prayer.
Maura has created a phrase over time; there will be repetition and stillness but no inconsistency. There is allowance to work on the floor, to sit.

Lou explores singing as an act that changes (and is changed by) the body, the space, the material and the immaterial world; boundaries; the act of singing as meditation, prayer, as a form of listening and receiving, as well as sounding and giving.
This work incorporates a minimal form of improvisation, allowing small changes to occur within the repetition of one song over a period of hours.

A new building that has space to be sung and moved into, creating new space within the space.
When will it become ritual? How will the physical (s)p(l)ace be affected?


“There is no path; we make the path by walking.”
Antonio Machado
Maura Hazelden on Holy Hiatus

Some of my durational performances lead to or start from a point of potential for a liminal (s)p(l)ace. Unrehearsed durational performance is a risk, stepping into a space to seek/find/wait for the unknown, the desire or threat of the other, the possibility of transformation. My themes have included sublimation and dreams, sensuality, the feminine, sleep – this culminated during a two week ointment residency in Quebec, I went out each day, in the February cold, to find a place to sleep – or not. How do I make myself sleep in snow in a strange place?

There has been a strong theme of transformation – Blodeuwedd: a woman made from flowers then turned into an owl, my current investigation of red riding wolf: girl to woman, to sexual being, to beast, to what with whom? Where and how is the shamanic (s)p(l)ace that allows the change?

I seek to capture evanescent nature of veils and flickering reflections, shadows, net curtains.
My work in varying degrees by its content/subject and or execution has a strong theme of the liminal, of thresholds breached or about to be, of transformation.


Through the work for Holy Hiatus I would like to explore the very physical that can change consciousness. The sense of a ritual or spiritual experience that can be created through continual movement in the form (probably) of repetitive movement. Or the boredom and despair. How to devise the phrase that will be repeated. How much conscious will must be used to keep it continuing. Will it change? Or rather how, as inevitably it will.

How do I make it ritual? When does it become ritual? How will the physical (s)p(l)ace be affected?
What happens when my work is combined with Louise Laurens exploring similar issues, in close proximity, but through the voice?

Miester Ekhart wrote of the nothingness of god; also he and Buddhists talk of non-attachment; there is a sense in which one should not be striving for something, even the “perfect” meditation or prayer, yet we are told “seek and ye shall find”. How to find the no-thing.