The fly­er says “This candlelit prom­en­ade per­form­ance will guide you though dif­fer­ent worlds with­in Inver­lochy House.” I was expect­ing some­thing that ref­er­enced the his­tory of the house. What I got was an explor­a­tion of storytelling and cre­ativ­ity.  Each sketch happened in a dif­fer­ent room in the house and did­n’t seem to be con­nec­ted to any of the oth­ers.

It star­ted in a twinkly candlelit hall­way. A cheer­ful woman wel­comed me in and invited me to take a glass of wine. All of the audi­ence then fol­lowed a man with a lan­tern along the hall­way into a room. Here we heard a sem­in­ar on the After­life. Quite thought pro­vok­ing, although I wanted more oppor­tun­ity for inter­ac­tion between the audi­ence  and the sem­in­ar lead­er. Next we wound our way into a room which con­tained a woman in a full bathtub. Tiny candles lit the space. A CD play­er was next to the bath. The woman told a story about a ter­rible thing that had happened at her work. This was the most appeal­ing of the sketches for me. Her long­ing for con­nec­tion played against her desire to seem in con­trol. Next it was up nar­row stairs into a room dimly lit by orange lights. A record­ing warned us against behav­ing in a cer­tain way. The group I was with imme­di­ately reacted against that although we were fairly con­trolled for the most part. Along anoth­er hall­way into a room with chairs to watch home videos from 2003. Young men talked about their home town, places they’d vis­ited, their fam­il­ies, and played up to the cam­era. It was cut togeth­er from dif­fer­ent videos. The most suc­cess­ful bits for me were when com­ments were jux­ta­posed against actions. Down sweep­ing stairs to the hall­way where we were treated to a microwave cook­ing show. It was clear in struc­ture but I was less clear as to why it was in the hall­way. Finally we were ushered into a room with a pian­ist who played a few bars of music then the rest of the per­formers walked in and just like that the show was over.

I found this an inter­est­ing hour, watch­ing as the per­formers explored ideas. It was­n’t fully suc­cess­ful for me as some of the ideas seemed half formed. Per­haps some more devel­op­ment would allow for more lay­ers in per­form­ance.

  • Res­id­ence, on at Inver­lochy Art School, March 1, 2, 3 2013