Loose Promise
Some stories are treason, some are dreamy, some are brutal, some are too funny to believe, some are too painful to tell straight, some are magical and others are poorly made, some might be the honest truth, and some are beautiful but hard to remember. A narrative is a slippery thing.
Kate McIntosh has collaborated with five writers to make the performance text for LOOSE PROMISE. She gave each of them the same set of narrative ingredients to start from, but asked each to write their own version of the story. The result is a collection of beautiful, difficult and compelling narratives. The stories are bound by their shared origin, but they head out in very different and surprising directions. The narratives of LOOSE PROMISE create worlds that echo each other, and yet can hardly co-exist. The performance itself, sparked by a fascination with the interdependence of stories, explores our compulsion to keep forming and digesting them….
On stage, the lone performer takes on the task of laying these narratives back together again. Allowing the events she tells to lodge in her own body she uses image, gesture and objects, to enact fragments of the stories she recounts. The debris of these versions and try-outs accumulates on stage, as the stories themselves stack and balance in unlikely combinations. In LOOSE PROMISE both the telling and hearing of a story is work – the pleasurable work of words, and the creative work of letting different worlds collide and tangle. Meanwhile, through this innovative performance, McIntosh asks what the stories we have are doing to us, as we let them enter our mouths, our thoughts and our memories.
The writers involved are Tim Etchells, M John Harrison, Deborah Levy, Richard Maxwell, and Jo Randerson.
Luc Massin
Credits
A project devised and performed by Kate McIntosh
Based on original texts written by Tim Etchells, M. John Harrison, Deborah Levy, Richard Maxwell and Jo Randerson – and on material written by Kate McIntosh
Dramaturgy: Lilia Mestre
Artistic advice from Fiona Wright, Caroline Daish, Katja Dreyer
Light design: Florian Bach
Video projections: Boris Belay
Production: Margarita Production for The Other vzw
Coproducers: Sophiensaele (D), Theater Gasthuis (NL)
With the support of: nadine, Kaaitheater (B), Les Halles de Schaerbeek (B), STUK Kunstencentrum (B), Kunstencentrum Vooruit (B), European Commission Culture 2006
The project LOOSE PROMISE is a commission of ‘Telling Time’ – a performance festival in the thematic of narrative.