“The thing is Charlotte - the church really is full of Seals and we have become the Ancestors” Hugh Lupton
The connection with Earth here is East Anglia and the lost land of Doggerland, a community performance, rooted in a particular place and the inter-disciplinary act of researching and creating an immersive, multi-arts experience (Songline for Doggerland 2018). In this collaborative project, creative and organisational disciplines were focused on, and held in the common frame of the making of an event but they overlapped and transformed each other's disciplinary thinking.
I reflect on Massumi’s (2010) assertion that everything which enters assembly must do so actively in order to create a transformative event. The “enabling constraint” (pg. 339) of having to make an performance, led to a number of ‘unforeseeable differentiations’ or juxtopositions and the Map/Benedicite sequence of land becoming lost was one of these.
The performance was a set of interlocking themes on Inundation. Firstly the people of Doggerland and the mythical world and connection (songline) to the landscape they inhabited. Secondly the inundation of ideas during the time of Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) and the tension between the church and the natural sciences (Cadbury 2000), and thirdly the inundation-which-is-to come. The artistic frame integrated subjects of global warming, natural science, geology, social science, local history, world history and archaeology and interpreted them through an immersive, ritualistic and mythical event.
Music, voice, light, darkness, a church, sculpture, craft, science, fire, ideas, word, micro cinema, video projection, place, song, movement, artefacts and people were assembled in a multiplicity of ways. As the artistic director I was responsible for layering all these interdisciplinary elements together whilst maintaining a fidelity to what may unexpectedly occur. A demanding responsibility requiring an open imagination and attention to the particular, unique situation (Stengers 2013 pg.188).
The Map was made by a local artist, the Benedicite is a Song of Creation. These elements were assembled (projected, with live singing) in a church after a scene between the historical curate (played by the actual rector) and the Darwinesque figure whose actual tomb was in the aisle of the church. From their separate disciplines Curate and Natural Scientist convivially contemplate the mysteries of the world. The Map/Benedicite sequence powerfully and affectively unravels time.
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