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Lookup NU author(s): Giles Bailey, Jamie Hammill, Craig Pollard
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The collaboration 'Islanders' (with Jamie Hammill, Nellie Saunby and Sophie Soobramanien) is an unfolding performance incorporating moving image, installation and printed matter to explore the construction of island identity at a point when the UK’s relationship to Europe is in drastic flux. By collectively expanding and re-staging historical diverse representations of islands that exist in the popular imagination, Islanders offers a collage of material to propose critical relationships to states of isolation, political fantasy and the promise of rescue. The performance builds a composite text from the fluid and dynamic resources of networked media. It weaves together references from cinema, literature, myth and anxious internet cultures. The flattening of hierarchies of these online archives allow Shakespeare’s indigenous island inhabitant Caliban, to speak through a teenage gamer traversing the tropical islands of Far Cry 3. At other moments a generic castaway performs plaintive auto-tuned versions of the songs of Simon and Garfunkel, a drone records an anthropomorphic coconut walking over the desolate beaches of England’s North East coast and politicians, novelists and monsters speak simultaneously. 'Islanders' aims to embody these wildly varying human experiences through choreographies, music, text and moving image to critique the alienating ideological positions that are shaping a hastily assembled British island identity. At the heart of the project has been a desire to let the material speak through the relationships in its various elements. Rather than offering an instructive or didactic position on the subject of the UK’s changing island identity, the work hopes to facilitate critical approaches from its audiences.
Performer(s)/Choreographer(s): Bailey G, Hammill J, Saunby E, Soobramanien S, Reid H, Denton G, Pollard C
Publication type: Performance
Publication status: Published
Venue: Star and Shadow Cinema
Location: Star & Shadow Cinema Co-op, Warwick St, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE2 1BB
Year: 2019
Duration: 30 minutes
Media of Output: Performance
URL: https://vimeo.com/339870747
