‘The Cut’

This high energy peripatetic performance is about home, about making a home together, about making a life together, and about holding that together when you are in crisis and grief.

Rebecca was too ill to travel, or perform, after a miscarriage, and so Ian performed aspects of her intended actions for her.

This work on a simple level is about surviving, doing what we have to do, and coping with grief. It’s about providing for ourselves, protecting ourselves, and limiting loss and damage on a mundane, and spiritual level, as we progress through our lives. It’s about living on a boat and the physical labour required to provide for the essentials, water, heat, food and sanitation, and how that must be maintained regardless of illness and grief. It’s about belonging and not belonging, belonging only where you make a place for yourself. It’s about connecting with traveller ancestors, with a broken lost lineage, through living nomadically. It’s about lack of family.

Ian worked in a totemic way with magpie wings throughout, using the magpie as symbolic of adaptability, divination, and a lifelong bond. To only see one of the pair is bad omen. He used his wings to sense things, and chose tarot cards. He nailed horse shoes to the table to secure good fortune. He cast circles of protection. He did the things we do when we try to make sense of things, and ward off things that scare us. He repeatedly, packed, moved unpacked and set up the home. Things were disassembled and reassembled, damaged, and remade as they are in life and finally raised to the ground leaving him to walk off into the distance to start over again.

Sound Score by Alice Kemp: alicekemp.net
Photo Documentation: Mariya Hoyin & Lenka Klodová
FNAF 8 (Festival Of Naked Forms), The Altenberg, Prague, Czech Republic,  9th September 2022
FNAF – Festival Of Naked Forms…

Gallery 1 – Mariya Hoyin

Gallery 2 – Photos by Lenka Klodová