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