On Lying (2008)

What's on her mind so far? War poetry and rock stars; philosophy, adrenalin, history and not playing the tambourine; skin that hangs on bones differently than it used to, not really having a life story to tell, the lungs of men, the weight of the microphone stand and singing so low that her voice disappears.

This one-woman performance arrives with a desire to tell it like it is, in a set list which includes a speech inspired by Siegfried Sassoon’s 1917 letter, Finished with the War, unaccompanied covers of rock songs and a long, long letter home. Fascinations with fictions open up as a body is moved to confess or at least commit to making it all up; but how many ways does a body tell its story? How did it come to this?

Stylised choreography combines with a personalised vein of writing from a truly individual artist, a couple more decades down the line, drenched in memory, resisting biography and learning to sing for you, to sing like she means it.This thing is indeed becoming something like a sketch for a rock opera or perhaps how she imagines writing a blog might be if she could only bear the thought of turning up in so many other people’s lives at once...

In the words of one shaken audience member in Chicago:  “more dark, more fragile, more...unlikely...”