Lines in the Sand by Gareth Evans
Last week writer, editor, producer, presenter and programmer, Gareth Evans visited the Lab. Tonight he will be hosting a conversation with Eelyn Lee and her team of collaborators about their experiences, ideas and reflections in the Barbican Cinema 2. Read his own thoughts on our adventures in to devised filmmaking in this poignant and insightful guest blog.
Let’s meet tomorrow if you choose upon the shore, beneath the bridge that they are building on some endless river… …I told you when I came I was a stranger. - Leonard Cohen, from Stranger Song
The context is all; the various transports, the means, the versions of arrival: day of rain, estuary weather, the constant pour of it. Slowing it all down, the city a crawl-space; buses locked nose to tail, so we’re off then and out in it, pedestrian in body but racing in the head while the news returns to the ‘30s, the time machine of austerity cuts losing us almost a century (in the centenary of conflict), while war by other means and war by the old means grinds on as well; and across the water, another Grand Jury failing – chokeholds as acceptable engagement; everywhere, parties digging in, closing down the borders, sealing out all difference; dark times…
“In the dark times Will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing, About the dark times.” – Bertolt Brecht
The Barbican is a bunker that forgot to go under, a prepared zone able to withstand all the weathers it needs to hold at bay. Too large to be buried, it’s a sky-high priced reminder of past, present and probable future – space as property – as that which will survive all the erasures.
We’re meeting in the Pit, the theatre at minus levels and counting. Passcodes on the stage door, industrial lifts, large enough for other realities to fit. We’re meeting backstage and down, far down. The lower depths are predicated around navigated confusion; a profusion of doors, a wonderland tumble. It’s impossible to know which open on what, on imagination or toilets, canteens or mirrors; changing rooms, all; hallways and corridors unscrolling in a seemingly endless passage; until one realises it is just that, a circular maze, an ouroboros eating itself. Mike Nelson’s Coral Reef has submerged and regrouped; in our end is our beginning… these are ghost-world dispatches – there are thousands down there, jostling for the spots, playing to the stalls…
But it feels suitable, this destabilising entrance, this complex harbouring in the morning’s main business. If it had all been straightforward, then surely that ease would have spilled into the reason we’re here, rendered it too regular, too familiar. After all, we’ve come to meet a monster…
Eelyn Lee and her Pit Lab ensemble are into their fourth day when I drop by, stacking up the hours without weather like their constantly shifting cardboard set, in freighted ventilation, cabled glow, a black walled box for 18, but strangely self-sufficient and like some ‘lord of the flies’ outcrop, seeming to run by its own unspoken rules and rituals, everyone getting on with something, and those who seem least active at a given moment still holding microphones on high stems, waiting for voices but maybe conjuring them too, sonic priestesses, aural conductors of the subterranean air.
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