Web and performance project in collaboration with Eddie Ladd. Mixing live webcam footage with media and performance footage, this web piece presents an evolving context of meaning, reactivating and re-siting the performance.
Stafell B (Room B) is a web and performance project produced in collaboration with the performer and NESTA Fellow Eddie Ladd. My input into the collaboration Stafell B was to design, art direct and develop a web piece that moved beyond simple web streaming, and my role was to create a web-based means of expression for the themes of the performance piece. The performance is informed by Welsh nationalism, specifically the militancy of the opposition to the controversial flooding of the Tryweryn Valley and destruction of the village of Capel Celyn, also alluding to the legend of Blodeuwedd, in a formal aesthetic influenced by the Polanski film ‘Repulsion’. The piece also explores conspiracy theory surrounding MI5 activity in the University of Aberystwyth’s welsh speaking halls of residence, leading to the discovery of the body of an agent in a wardrobe in Santiago, Chile.
The ‘web piece’ randomly selects and montages images from a database numbering more than 8000. The images fall into several main categories: live images streamed at the time of the performance; mediated images of performance rehearsals; ambient graphics that form a backdrop to these; live webcam images from sites in Liverpool (UK), Santiago (Chile) and Aberystwyth (Wales); and images from only existing film of the village of Capel Celyn, used with permission from the National Library of Wales. The random recombination of these images from different spatial and temporal locations provides a different experience for each viewer of the piece, and their presentation in an ongoing present places under scrutiny the relationship between mediation, documentation and history. The piece exists as an unstable document, constantly variable and evoking the sense of a re-awakened, contingent memory.
Staging & Lighting Ceri Nicholls
Assistants Emma Jones & Steven Bishop
Web piece Michael Day
Visuals Jamie Andrews
Soundtrack Dewi Evans
Text Roger Owen
Choreography Eddie Ladd & Margaret Ames
Performer Eddie Ladd
Special thanks to Friars School, Bangor
View the Stafell B website.