Some attributes of Papa Legba: loa of crossroads, ways & thresholds; facilitator of communication, speaking all languages; speaker & way-keeper between the world of the living & of the dead; he is syncretised with St Anthony, patron saint of lost things.
One of the interesting & trickier questions in thinking about making an event for/with/through/in Talliston is the relationship of the spaces to each other & how this affects those experiencing the house itself & any event therein. Each space (room or garden) has - is - its own time zone, location, has its own multi-layered history, & its own sound & scent. There are no neutral in-between spaces to buffer the transitions - any space between rooms is a place in in its own right (the palazzo Hall of Mirrors stairway & entrance vestibule filled with clocks, the Fountain Courtyard), so the visitor to the house moves instantly between space, place & time. For a visitor on a guided tour of the house, this can be exhilarating even as it can be disorientating, the labyrinth pathway dissolving a sense of conventional layout, while the guided aspect provides a continuous thread that stands in for a through-narrative (the umbrella narrative being the story of the house's transformation: conception, evolution & completion), as the visitor is dropped in & out of each room or garden's specific story. For an event like ours, things become more complicated. As we engage with the immersive natures & histories of the spaces, we are also evolving our own takes on them, as we develop ways of exploring the rooms & gardens using sound, performance & other elements. But this separates us from Talliston's overarching narratives - its creation history, the guided thread, & the new narrative introduced in the Stranger's Guide to Talliston novel - & this separation gives us an interesting problem, because however engaging we can make the experience of each space, the participants' overall experience risks being a dislocated, serial one of separated spaces without the satisfying accumulation serial structures can bring, or the warmth of comprehension of an overall through-narrative to tie the spaces together. So, this leaves us with some approaches to consider - we might highlight the dislocations, the labyrinthine disorientation, the juxtapositions & jump cuts; we might create our own through-narrative, tying the spaces together, guiding the experience of the participants; or we might find a way to smooth the passage between spaces whilst still leaving the narrative relatively unimposed, available to each visitor to craft for themselves. A possibility might be to reconsider the relationship of the spaces to each other - instead of fully separate spaces, one might conceive a situation where the spaces have been brought into contact with each other, where the thresholds, boundaries are blurring, & where (while each space retains all of its particular, engaging character, nuances & histories) elements might emerge (however tiny) & manifest, to indicate a strange overlapping or interpolation of the spaces - an approach which may open up ways to explore any of the ways our guests might experience the event. A question of stories: an intersecting, overlapping, emerging, layered, fragmenting constellation of stories & how they are experienced, & the bigger stories they coalesce to form? ***** Other notes: One of the most creatively seductive rooms in the house is the Room of Dreams, the Alhambra palace bedroom, whose travel-writer inhabitant has decorated the walls with souvenirs from her many journeys. The room itself, with its gauze net hazing the bed & is suggestion of a continuation beyond the window draws the visitor into a dreamlike state. The room is suffused by its own dreams, the dream of its own time & place, & the dreams of places travelled to & experiences lived - but the filtered light calls other possibilities & states of dreaming: the dreams brought in by creators & collaborators; the dreams of our audience; the dream states of the other rooms & their inhabitants; the dreams we follow; & it seems humans are not the only animals who dream.... Another room currently occupying my thoughts is the Haunted Bedroom, whose ambience perfectly captures its gothic narrative, a tale of hauntings & a dead child. But how else might we explore the idea of haunting, or hauntings? Haunting is a word we use more widely alongside the ghostly connotations - we are haunted by a melody or a phrase, an event or a place that resurfaces in our memories; places we return to time after time are our haunts - we ourselves haunt them; & this brings us back to being haunted by people, leading us back to our own & others' ghost stories. & what else does the room give us? what to make of the ceiling decorated wth children's stories & fairytales? having recently recovered childhood books of fairytales, whose text & illustrations had remained more embedded in memory than i had realised, perhaps this lends us another aspect to the hauntings this room might encompass... Gavin After our whirlwind trip to Essex, Gavin and I met with Gemma and Gary to discuss our ideas. This meeting cemented for me just how extraordinary Tallistion is - the distortion of time and place was difficult to explain and it became clear that, until Gemma and Gary had also experienced it, we would not be able to make any concrete plans for the content of our performance.
However, we had a great session coming up with potential ideas. We explored the different ways we could use the space and how we could interact with/enhance/become part of Talliston. Would it be more successful to allow members of the public to explore freely, or to guide them through each room? Could we change what people might encounter in each space, thereby increasing the feeling of an ever-shifting labyrinth? Will there be a 'story' behind the performance? If so, how clear or abstract would that be? Perhaps we could leave 'clues' to the story for people to interact with? What level of interactivity would create the best experience? etc etc... As you can see, there are more questions than answers at this point, but there's plenty to experiment with when Gemma and Gary experience the magic of Talliston for themselves. Rachel |
time is different here...
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