Concept, Direction
Nicola Dahlinger
Choreography
Vanessa Mildenberg
Costume
Jeanette Sendler
Performers
Claudine Biswas, Scott Bradbury, Roberta Gotti, Kathy Hoyland, Tanja Johnson, Vanessa Mildenberg, Joe Morrell, Thomas Thoroe
Produced by Nicola Dahlinger with generous support from Friends of Brompton Cemetery
Brompton Cemetery, London, 1999
Inspired by the Brompton Cemetery in London, Nicola Dahlinger arranges a selection of the poems in four phases - disease and dying (Nights of 1990), death and loss (Fragments from an Explanation, After you died and Night Letter), leave-taking and yearning for contact (Feast of Salt), retrospective and insight (Banners). These phases are staged as a journey through the four colonnades of the cemetery with a narrator, a chorus of ghosts and the audience members. The cemetery, with its mix of graffiti-smeared colonnades, overgrown graves, an active gay scene, joggers and dog walkers and an atmosphere of ecstasy, mortality and quotidian life, corresponds with the first poem Nights of 1990. McCann speaks of his simultaneous experience of physical passion and physical decay.
For the chorus of ghosts, Jeanette Sendler creates costumes made of felt, bark and moss, which resemble the surface structure of the grave stones. They make for a connection between the grave stones, the performers and the audience.
"The story takes us into seedy backstreets for early sexual encounters, into depersonalised hospitals in the vain battle for life and off on anguished drinking binges in the wake of the inevitable bereavement. Informing this narrative are the themes of touching and breathing, leading to a fantasised reunion with the loved one and releasing the narrator back out of the underworld. […] Whatever one´s private response, the event itself is a great pretext for indulging melancholy emotions of one´s own, recollected in the tranquility of this beautiful cemetery." Time Out, August 1999