Playful and poetic, Fields (Extract) is a compelling performance that draws the audience into a textured landscape of stone, where patterns
of dwelling are made and unmade, shaped by land, by time and human hands.
The episodic narrative of the performance offers snapshots of lives lived out amidst stony ground where duration expands to take in the enduring labour of ages past, present and perhaps yet to come.
Layered with detail and played out to an intermittent sound score, images emerge of agricultural labouring, the toil of turning stony ground and defending territories.
And finally, at the end of the day, the scraping of boots and a laying down to rest on pillows of stone.
What callused speech rubbed its edges
Soft and hard again and soft
Again fitting these syllables
to the long swell of land, in the long
Press of weather? Eyes that closed
To gaze at grass-points and gritty chippings.
From ‘Walls’ by Ted Hughes
Performed by Merav Israel & Claire Pençak with a recorded score by Nik Paget-Tomlinson with Jem Le Lievre
Audience feedback
“Mesmerising“
“Riveting“
“Deceptively minimalist: two dancers with stones in a space, but oh so many layers and meanings! Ever changing in every second. Sometimes I saw direct links to the Borders countryside …sometimes I saw political links to changing borders, territorial issues; sometimes it was only about the rocks, connected to earth by gravity, but always shifting; different sounds of rocks against different surfaces.“
“The piece stayed with me for few days…I was taken by the layers and textures and rich symbolism and realised it is one of the most exciting things I’ve seen.“
“Texture is exactly the experience I had of the dance….. I could actually smell the rocks, found the soundtrack fabulous, and had moments of going into: stickiness, dryness, grating/grazing, tectonic shift/force; pattern,pattern,pattern…shift…pattern. Amongst other things.“
“The dance floor is strewn with stones – jutting, hard, grey, white, beige, brown. The dancers bundle stones up in their arms and push or place them round the space. Once a configuration is reached. A nod to each other proclaims their readiness to engage with this dangerous territory. We are watchers from a distance, seeking sense, exercising our human compulsion to make patterns of meaning from what we see and experience – our own thought journey….I feel warmed and released by the performance into a space / time / stone / love-land loop that is deeply nourishing, actively connecting the dance with my own experience with fields and dry stone walls. I’ve been in the hands of two dancers at their peak and I salute them….the dancers have not put a foot wrong and are upright, relaxed and involved as the audience applauds.”
Fields (Extract) was made with support from Dance Base, City Moves, The Workroom, Tramway