play premiered at Spirited Bodies 10!
There are so many stories when moving, especially when this is not your first move, when even your first move amounted to a migration, and when you move to what seems a far flung part of the country from where you have been. I had been thrilled to disentangle this exciting conundrum of story lines, points, crossings (of borders) and junctions (of stories), and had written posts about this on my blog and beyond – for example in ‘From the City to the Sea last year From the City to the Sea | ColourCirclesite (wordpress.com). Tracing, outlining, grasping, internalising, communicating and art-making the vastness of this new location, that was my big topic of 2019, and 2020 the whole Lockdown story-box has given it yet a further dimension – and I had the urge to perform it, articulate it, have a discussion, a conversation about all these aspects. And so my little play ‘Sea Too’ developed. It’s a lot to do with geography, the co-ordinates of place: where am I? So the play looks at that.
Then Spirited Bodies turned 10. For all those who don’t know, Spirited Bodies is an organisation, run by my dear friend Esther Bunting, about life modelling, body positivity, feminism and personal empowerment. Have a look here: Spirited Bodies – activist life modelling and life drawing And here my play found a home for its premiere! Below are photos of the event, taken by Esther – and my dim reproduction of them.
I was totally overwhelmed by the performance and thanks to all for your lovely comments!
I had made maps to illustrate where I am. Maps, I like making them, describing where I am. It’s like tube lines on a larger scale, instead of ‘change at Finsbury Park from the Victoria Line to the Piccadilly Line (changing is easy at this stop, just run through, the other line is right opposite, through the little arch in the wall – except when you are coming from the other direction of the line, then you have to go up and down the stairs), and then get off at the next stop’ – it’s across the country, at the seaside, but not the East Coast, near Scotland but not quite, beyond Wales, in fact beyond Morecambe Bay, but it’s that side, that coast. You can take a train from Carlisle, 4 stops down – first you pass through Dalston – which sounds just like in London but isn’t – then Wigton, which sounds quite ordinary – then Aspatria, which is an amazing name! – and then Maryport, little stop, easy to miss. So that’s some of the description, but then there is the story with the sea too! It’s Irish Sea here but not quite Ireland. The mountains you see on the horizon are of Scotland. Then in the distance there is more land, but it’s not Ireland yet, it’s the Isle of Man – just half way across the Irish Sea. So you can see up until the half-way point, after that the distance takes over.
So this is how the play had developed. Articles I had written from which it developed in particular are my piece called ‘Bodylands, published in Haus-a-Rest’: Bodylands by Ursula Troche — HAUS-A-REST (squarespace.com
Sea to Sea – North and Irish’ published in Morimaru – North Sea Thinkers: https://www.morimaru.org/seatoseaursulatroche
and also ‘a psychogeography of where I grew up’ , published in Particulations: https://particulations.blogspot.com/2017/10/a-psychogeography-of-where-i-grew-up.html
I am still reeling from the premiere of my play and then realised i have to record it and to make a little tiny film of it. I am so totally unprepared about catching up doing this – but can’t wait mention it already! So here it will appear in the next week.
and here Sea Too will appear.: in three parts: 1: Map, 2. Body, 3: Now.
– so more coming very very soon, after the zoom…
ColourCirclesite 