STAGE MANAGEMENT
DESIGN
ACTING
AND MORE
ERICKA LEE
CONKLIN
In the midst of Life we are in death
In the Midst of Life we are in Death was a site specific composition for Abney Park Cemetary in Dalston, London, Uk. Abney Park Cemetary is one of the 'Magnificent Seven' landscaped cemetaries in London. These cemetaries have been reclaimed to function as parks. The performance was a collaboration with Jiajing Zhang and Ragini Singh. It explored the connection between life and death and the concept of 'Necropolis,' a city of the dead. Taking the text from various gravestones we generated 'automatic' poetry and led our audience through the cemetery which is a dizzying maze. We also incorporated the use of bells in a reference to the bells that Victorians would run up from the recently burried in case someone had been burried alive. We felt that these bells, often rang from a distance evoked the sense of the dead communicating.
An exerpt from Ericka's research statement:
When approaching a cemetery, one is instantly aware of being surrounded by death. To approach our performance and to ignore this fact would have been to make a performance that did not belong in that space. However we were also struck by the undeniable presence of life at Abney Park Cemetery, which now functions more as a park than as a cemetery. People go there to walk their dogs, have a beer with friends, and to defy death by making love. Not only were the people in the park so obviously alive but the grounds and stones themselves were being reclaimed by nature. This was a place where life and death intersected with one another effortlessly. So we wanted to explore the relationship between life and death.
An exerpt from Ericka's dissertation:
In the Midst was more traditionally Gothic. It fulfilled much of Groom’s ‘Gothic Recipe’—the topography was in a forest (of sorts); the texts were often fragmented and broken, taken from inscriptions; we utilized the spiritualism of Christian burials and mysticism; and the psychological elements of sleep walking, ghostly presences, and death. In our rehearsals we had even discussed how the meteorological intrusion of rain and wind would have suited the piece better than a sunny day. The architecture of Abney Park Cemetery is a ruined Neo-Gothic. The presence of destroyed Gothic architecture throughout England is a constant reminder of the violent reformations and the Civil War. As the buildings are reclaimed by nature, they represent more than nature’s triumph over humanity, they represent a dark past. “The dissolution of the monasteries…had huge and irrevocable social effects but also created an aesthetic of ruin. Decapitated images in stone and glass [and] mutilated and abandoned buildings … testified to the violence of the dissolution, but were also now embedded in the landscape and the imagination in new ways.”[1] Abney Park cemetery, though possessing of a less dark past similarly activated our imagination. The park or cemetery is in conflict with itself, painting the struggle between life and death. Trees and plants grow, reclaiming land which had been tamed by humans and life wins, but the plants can’t hide the amount of death in the cemetery and death seems to conquer, and yet people walk through the park, living their lives every day. The conflict goes on.
In the sixteenth century John Foxe’s inspiration at the dissolution of the monasteries led him to write Acts and Monuments which told stories of Protestant martyrdom. “Foxe’s preference was to use the martyr’s own words in first-person accounts…[giving] special prominence to last words…but other literary models were also invoked, from letters to legal depositions, form sermons to folktales, and some of the martyrdoms have the contours of romance, even comedy.”[2] While we did not use the last words of the people buried in Abney Park cemetery, we did utilize the last words that their loved ones left them with to honor them in the performance.
[1] Nick Groom; The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction; (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) , 28
[2] Groom, 29-30
*full dissertation available upon request.