Whilst playing around with our objects that could possibly reveal our space; egg carton cups and shoe boxes, we only just took notice of the art featured already in the space. Jan Ijas’ ‘Two Islands’ is a film about two enormous waste dumps in New York City – Staten Island and Hart Island – and explores the notion of the contemporary landfill as an archaeological deposit.
Coincidently this film talks about the boxes used as coffins that people were put in who had no one to claim them. We felt this tied in well with our use of boxes to reveal a space and therefore played around with the idea of writing fragmented words on the boxes. We originally started with the obvious; ‘baby #1’, ‘old man’, ‘the lost’ which did not come through to the audience as we intended, it was too obvious and they felt we were feeding them what we were exploring. We discussed words that tie in the confined spaces we are using and the gloomy tone that the film possesses; ‘controlled’, ‘restricted’ and ‘suffocated’. Whilst we had so many ideas for the one space, its twin on the parallel side of the building needed to be brought into our performance, unfortunately its aesthetics are not as good and we struggled to find inspiration in the space. For that reason, we focused our attention on the initial space and hoped that as the rehearsals and explorations went on we would come across the purpose for the second space.
At the same time as working on the space we were interested in the idea of incorporating a poem in the background to play with our performance; we looked at the things that people would have missed out from who died in Ijas’ film and created a short poem;
“Life reduced to refuse, Isn’t there more than this? The Lost, forgotten, no names no faces, just a date, time and place. Life reduced to numbers. It started as one, then came more, Too many to count. Nothing but a mass grave. One. Two. Three. Four…”
This poem enabled us to explore into more ideas of things that would fit nicely into our poem;
“Hairbrushes, dollies, brand new frocks. Dentist visits, tears, knee high socks. Late night dinner, eavesdropping, being a great fried. Doing what you love, midnight calls, knowing what’s around the bend.”
This part of the poem was inspired from our ideas of, similarly to our space, things that are overlooked and forgotten about in a person’s life. Important things that we take for granted when we grow up. We decided it would definitely be used, and we possibly liked the idea of Tequila standing behind the boxes, reading the poem and being the object of revelation.