Seek to Seek
‘the hand is the human being’s external brain…’
Seek to Seek was developed by Cantabile 2 and their collaborators in a derelict former nursing home in the beautiful countryside on the Danish Island of Møn. The work then transferred to Copenhagen where it was part of the My World Images Festival in August/September 2010. The cast was made up of performers from 9 different countries from across the world – Australia, Denmark, Egypt, France, Poland, Scotland, Sweden, Syria and Germany.
I was delighted to be representing Scotland, to be given the opportunity to take my work abroad and meet and collaborate with so many exciting and talented performers in one piece of work.
The work was made across seven levels and for each performance 24 spectators were invited and led to the performance through a “Changing Room”, where personal belongings are left, the audience was then led into the first level of the performance: Being.
In “Being” each spectator was given the possibility to choose between the 24 unique mental DNA treads of the performance, each formulated as a philosophical question – i.e. Can you see your own way of seeing? Are thoughts created by pictures or words?
The question which one chooses determined the individual journey through the next 4 levels: Touching, Seeing, Feeling and Thinking.
In these levels there were 24 individual rooms inhabited by people waiting to meet the spectator in a real and meaningful dialogue – each spectator got to see three rooms. The way that the spectator interacted in these rooms determined their journey to the final levels of Loving and Ending.
To be able to ‘tailor make’ a piece of theatre especially for the space that i am working in, for me is my dream way to work. I created a Touching room for this project, a room in the pitch-dark inspired by the sentence ‘the hand is the human being’s external brain‘. I also played a part in the Being and the Ending sections of the work and I calculated that over 100 individual spectators visited me in my room during both runs of the work in Denmark.
Director: Nullo Facchini
Concept: Nullo Facchini and Ole Fogh Kirkeby
Set Design: Kristian Knudsen
Producer: Susanne Danig