Fiona Wright, Behind Doors
Performance: Fiona Wright in collaboration with Becky Edmonds
Duration: 10 minutes, maximum 5 people.
Fiona Wright (b. London 1966) has been making performances since the late 1980s - often described as “rare” and shifting between strength and vulnerability - working over the years through writing and choreography. Recent solo work includes the one-woman show, On Lying (supported by Arts Council England and OPENPORT Chicago, and recently seen at National Review of Live Art, Glasgow). Previous close-up pieces, sometimes for an audience of one, include salt drawing 2004, and a series of solo performance lectures, "Other versions of an uncertain body".
www.fionawright.org
www.beckyedmunds.com
www.historydances.co.uk
You take a seat. Your body is arranged around the edges of your own field of vision. There will be a shift of the look or a lowering of the eyes. I am standing nearby, taking care of the space, keeping things going and keeping time. Images play on the surface of a small screen. Brief glimpses out of the corner of an eye. What am I thinking, all day in the house? I am thinking, I am disappearing. Or I am something like your shadow, somehow always there. Alone and in your presence. You watch, I’ll just wait.
A short, live encounter offering each spectator a close-up moment, a slightly different picture - interrupted by the door opening, the audience replaced and another version beginning.
To approach a house as a site invites the possibility for small-scale encounters, carrying the suggestion of - the uncertainty, if not the assured experience - intimacy.
Inner sanctum - the domestic life - the larger body of the house.
Colonisation of other bodies - other continents.
Private lives - unseen and ongoing - behind closed doors.
Inner worlds - enclosed life - our imagining and memories.
A performance made for a small audience of only five people in a room for a short time, with the potential to include the behaviour of social formality and informality. The audience might stand-in for a family group or dinner guests, seated at a table together, each spectator bringing a personal viewpoint into the room.
A short work for the audience and a longer work for the performer - some kind of devotion to the task of providing. The body of the performer in attendance in the room, in a constant state of waiting. Performed actions and repeated gestures as traces of presence - noticed or unnoticed. The solo performance occupying the periphery, not necessarily being the central focus or commanding attention throughout. The look, in fact, sometimes deflected, perhaps becoming as much about the glance as the gaze.