Performance photos: Tamas Kovacs
This solo work combines improvised movement, speech, and actions within a detailed score. Structured in three parts, with distinct tasks in each section, the material references weather and climate, farming and agriculture, and the relationships of humans to the other-than-human.
On a residency at Live Art Ireland, Co. Tipperary in October 2023, I worked in the fields nearby, responding to place, to evidence of farming, to processes and materials used in the growth, harvesting, and storage of grass. Playing with buckets, fertilizer bags, hay and silage bales, I considered the grass as crop, as fodder and as having economic value in the production of milk or beef. Close to the ground, being in the fields, I was aware of plants as indicators of environmental damage, of ecological disruption, as impacted by human activity. The playing took shape as a set of new games, drawing on the tradition of local sports, from parish-level GAA to Community Games. This intersects with a sense of gamification expanding into all areas of life, and the continued prioritising of growth models along with notions of progress, despite compelling evidence of climate crisis and environmental breakdown.
Looking at grass and plant life, at rural life, at the impact of the dairy industry, the piece considers interaction of human and other-than-human systems. Simple actions with props and tasks are structured into a sequence, threaded through with spoken text. There are bin liners, a bucket, gloves, knee pads, a body, and words that slip between contexts of climate, sport, and agriculture.
First performance:
SOAK, Leadworks, Plymouth on January 25th 2024
Organised by Sarah Blissett and Kerry Priest, SOAK is a bi-monthly live art series with a number of performers each time, bringing together live art, experimental performance, film, spoken word and music.
Performance Text:
The spoken text for the performance was improvised live from a body orf material developed in rehearsal and from research. A version of the core text is here: Cream of the Crop Text
Video Works:
Part of the development work I did at Live Art Ireland was presented as three short video works Three Games for Grass: Hay Bale Circuiting, Grass Bucket Head Crawl and Bale Bouldering (2023) shown as part of Alive & Kicking, Live Art Ireland, Saturday 9th December 2023.
An example of one of the games can be seen on Vimeo: ‘grass bucket head’