‘It was a dark and stormy night and the First Mate turned to the Captain and said “Captain tell us a story” and the Captain said ‘It was a dark and stormy night…’
The Gathering Storm is a 12-hour durational performance exploring the pleasure of invention, the work of memory, and the destruction of forgetting. Inspired by a never-ending circular joke, three performers will work to create, tell, and attempt to remember an increasingly gigantic story, that their memory cannot retain as time goes on.
How will the show work:
Two candlelit performers at the front of the space, dressed as pirates, will take turns telling a story that gains a new sentence each time it is told, all of which the two pirates must faithfully remember. As the story increases in size and the performers’ minds come under the strain of exhaustion, their memory will begin to fail and characters and events will begin to disappear from the story as quickly as they are introduced.
The third performer, lit by laptop and projector light, will work ceaselessly to type up an accurate version of the story, projected onto the back of the space for the audience, but not the other performers, to see. The third performer will also keep time and record the number of times the story is told, but crucially will act as a last resort replacement for the forgetful pirate performers. As the performance proceeds the third performer will become increasingly vocal as the exhausted performers become silent.
Or at least this is how the show is currently planned to operate, but this may change as new ideas and rehearsals influence the piece...
The process of moving from an idea to a performance will be documented here.
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