vessel
vessel is about how we gain and maintain stability in the unstable world of contested narratives, alternative facts and irreversible consequences. The original production was created with four performers and the poetic and political script utilised polyphony. In 2022 vessel was reworked as a duet performed by Sue MacLaine with live sound mixing by Owen Crouch and was performed as part of the Recycling Plant evening curated by Emergency Chorus at Camden People’s Theatre in London
vessel was originally co-commissioned by the Attenborough Centre for Creative Arts and Battersea Arts Centre and premiered October 2018.
Original cast:Tess Agus, Angela Clerkin, Kailing Fu, Karlina Grace Paseda
The performance uses creative captioning throughout, designed by digital artist Giles Thacker so is accessible to deaf and hard of hearing audiences.
An original score by Owen Crouch accentuates the themes of radical aloneness and radical togetherness and underpins the delicate choreography of Seke Chimutengwende. Ben Pacey’s luscious set and Holly Murray’s costumes re-imagine the Anchoress and her cell for the 21st century.
Reviews
“The feelings that words create, rather than their meaning, come to the fore in this quietly revealing piece”
Four peaceful-looking women sit on chairs in a cramped stage space. Grainy light seeps through three small windows. An orange screen above the women is filled with a stream of projected words, which the women recite. The phrasing is fractured, overlapping and untethered. Glimmers of meaning occasionally wriggle free, but meaning isn’t really the point. Vessel is a chance for the audience to step away from reality and get lost, perhaps escape, together.
“MacLaine crafts a sentence the way a composer crafts a melody: subtly changing tone, timbre, pitch and emotion through the full spectrum of the actresses’ voices.”
In vessel, Sue MacLaine has created a quietly hypnotic show utilising the bodies and voices of four different women from different backgrounds, races and experiences. With their voices she composes a musical quartet using words that repeat, overlap and interweave. Sometimes a single voice is heard, at other times all four voices create a polyphony of sound.
