Back in January, Rachel & I made our first visit to Talliston House & Gardens to experience directly its spaces, its sounds, smells & histories, & to meet its creator John Trevillian. Getting beyond the indirect contact of webpages, pdfs & emails & immersing ourselves in the House as an environment was immediately stunning, almost shocking & then exciting in the way the place lives through the physical experience of it - being in it - & subsequently through a variety of recollective perspectives, where (as Simon McBurney reminds us in his essay for Complicite's Mnemonic) to remember is to do literally that - to piece together (re-member) disparate elements into a patchwork whole (as far as we know, memories are not stored whole in the brain, but diffused, with different elements in different areas). This means certain details leap out with a crisp clarity, whereas others retain a shadowy, dreamlike quality.
Rachel & I have had 7 months or so to ferment this initial encounter, allowng the imaginative & somatic experience of the house to settle & letting ideas & concepts for our event evolve & develop. The event is however a collaborative endeavour, not only between the two of us, but also with our performers, Gemma Bass & Gary Farr of the Vonnegut Collective. We reached a point where no more development could happen until Gemma & Gary had seen Talliston & met John, & so we arranged a weekend there, where Rachel & I would spend a more immersive period at Talliston, sleeping & eating there, & trying to put some of our ideas into context & practice. Gary & Gemma joined us for the Sunday, & it was an excellent experience to have our simmering ideas electrified by the same sort of immediate reaction from the Vonneguts as we'd had months before. Bringing our performers into the space confirmed some plans & jump-started the excitement that knowing a performance will work brings, & the almost jittery excitement of feeling the urge to push the project forwards. Each of us has a room which speaks to them the most; each has ideas dear to them that they want to find appearing in the event. All of us share strong feelings for what the event should be, what sort of experience our guests should have, & it was a pleasure to discover that we agreed on many important things, & to find disagreements that will prove the essential grit to form the pearl in the oyster. Rachel, Gary & Gemma provide their own takes on things below, giving hints of where this event might go. Photos from the visit can be seen here. Our next communication will make more explicit (without entirely giving the game away) what the event will be, tasters of what our guests might expect, the beginnings of where their journey might take them, but for now.... Gavin * Talliston's dream-like quality was a main point of discussion over the weekend. During one such conversation, Gemma suggested we could record our dreams to explore the different elements. In doing so, I noticed a connection between my dream-life and Talliston. My dreams are often set in scenes that, upon waking, seem to have no connection to one another - for example, one night I went from a music storeroom in a music school I used to attend, to a racetrack from which lava oozed and trickled, to a white hotel room where the view showed the fish in the sea in surprising detail. These changes were as abrupt as walking through a doorway and, during the dream, they made complete sense. In the same way, while staying at Talliston, the layout of the house began to seem logical to me. Of course you walk up the stairs in Italy and end up in a room in Scotland, who would have it any other way? It is only afterwards, when you try to explain the experience to someone, that you realise how illogical it seems... Perhaps our event in Talliston will have the same effect - a journey that carries you through the house, as if in a dream, and will be difficult to describe to anyone who has not experienced it. Rachel * Having heard so much about Talliston House and Gardens it was great to finally arrive there to plan our performances. Although I knew that this remarkable place is situated on an unremarkable street, it still took me by surprise. A nearby neighbour was washing his car. ‘Does he know?’ I thought. ‘Is he in on the secret?’. Something magical this way lies. It immediately became apparent that the advice of my colleagues that this was a place that had to be seen in person to be fully appreciated was spot on. Over the course of the next hour or so as we were shown around by John, its creator, this whole project came to life in my mind and took on new complexities as we delved further into the labyrinth of the house and the stories behind it. The idealist in me applauds John’s ethos of making his house all the places he’d most like to live in at once, and I was struck by the openness of a physical manifestation of one man’s desires and imagination...and there we were, free to explore it. John’s vision is fully formed, and meticulously mapped out. So once becoming more familiar with it, ideas of how to create our own journey here and perform in such a space came quickly. The whole experience felt like a dream, and that is something we can capture and play with. There is mystery and intrigue here and though it feels other worldly, there is also a search for personal meaning that hugely appeals to me. Gary * I know for a fact that I am in a lot of people’s contacts as ‘Gemma Violin’ so as to remind them who I am and what I do. This gets a little confusing sometimes as my name is actually Gemma Bass and there is a particularly good bass player in the North West who is also called Gemma, but that’s another story… I have a feeling, however, that John, the creator of Talliston, might be on such good terms with his taxidermist that he just has him in his phone as ‘Frank’, or ‘Geoff’ or whatever his name is. The character and expression in the faces of every fox, squirrel and raven in this remarkable home gives an inkling of the personal nature of the quest of its owner. Talliston feels to me now as John’s vivid imagination and innate attention to detail given form – his busy and inspiring brain turned inside out for us all to visit and walk around in. But it’s not all about him, not for a moment, we are invited to search among it and find things we can connect with, which then connect us with him but also with each other and people form our own lives and histories. But, further still, it opens the questions up to each of us: where and when in the world would I most like to have Sunday morning breakfast? Maybe I haven’t been there yet, maybe it’s time I went looking for it… In terms of our project, at first I was worried that the house is so full, so complete, that adding anything to those rooms would detract from the experience. But thinking more on those personal connections and the dreamlike quality of stepping from one place and time to another with no rhyme or reason, maybe that’s the way we should go. Dreams are something else we all have in common, whether we remember them or not, but they are so private (just like John’s imagination was before Talliston), it would be a real gift for an audience to get to experience someone else’s dream, to walk around it and find something that they can relate to. Music is so personal and so internal, it might just be the perfect medium for exploring that. Gemma Comments are closed.
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time is different here...
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