Project Archive

A Testimony and a Silence

May 2014 – a site-specific performance piece in Dilston Grove in Southwark Park.

Dilston Grove is an arts space and former church, was home to the first iteration of the company's engagement with the rarely-performed play, The Massacre by Elizabeth Inchbald.

Dilston’s layers of meaning, as a place of sanctuary, as a disused and erased place of worship, and as an exhibition space, of looking and remembering, connected powerfully with the play’s tensions around the impulse to testify to terrible events, and its equal and opposite need to look away. 

Cary: The Mariam Cycles

August 2013 –  The Copeland Gallery, Peckham.

Part installation, part performance-as-art-exhibition, the space operated as a lens through which Elizabeth Cary’s brilliant but never performed play, the first to be written and published by a woman in the UK - was examined, performed and celebrated.

The performance, complete with squabbling curators, arguing over the importance of Cary’s work, managed to be beautiful, funny and moving. 

Mariam at Burford: Youth and Young Girlhood

June 2013, Professor Liz Schafer invited us to develop the site specific research around the text of Mariam for a performance at the Burford Festival, the town of Cary’s birth.

Part performance, part installation, this 70 minute performance inhabited the church where Elizabeth would have worshipped as a girl, married, and where her family, the Tanfield’s, are ostentatiously entombed. This performance sought to explore Elizabeth’s play in the town she lived in as a child and young woman.  The research centred on resonances between Elizabeth’s life and work, offering a unique opportunity to hear and experience the voice of this remarkable woman, in a contemporary working.