The beginning of something…
In 2025, after many years where my own creative practice had taken a backseat, I got back in the room as an artist and took the first steps in creating a new piece of physical theatre.
Supported by Shoresh Foundation to research and develop my ideas, I spent months sketching, thinking, reading, pursuing sources of inspiration, having conversations and gathering a creative team.
I wrestled with how to explain what I was doing. This is a partial answer:
From the small, quiet adjustments of the body in prayer to the relentless scramble through the obstacle course of the year in festivals, we’ll be exploring how the movements core to Jewish practice can connect us to different experiences of meaning and the passing of time.
Because what it was really about was time – the architecture of time.
That phrase comes from Abraham Joshua Heschel’s landmark book, The Sabbath. How we as humans mark time, how we perceive our histories, seasons and lifetimes, and how ritual can fill our time with meaning.
We had an ensemble of brilliant movers, improvisers and movement directors comprising Charlotte Mooney (Artistic Director of acclaimed contemporary circus company Ockham’s Razor), Yael Elishever, Guy Woolf, and Rachel-Leah Hosker (of The Pappy Show). Our musical director was Joseph Finlay, and we were joined by choreographer Rosemary Lee OBE, and Clown Consultant Lauren Silver. The producer was Rachel Borchard Lewis, and JW3 kindly supported us with rehearsal space.
We were fortunate to have visual artist Beatrice Baumgartner-Cohen documenting the process live, which shed new light on the exploration and our findings as we went. She abstracted the people in the room as birds, as you can see from the image above (an abstraction of an early exercise in contact improvisation).
And as I played – initially alone, then for a day or two with some of the other artists, and in June with the full team, a new form (in fact two distinct forms) began to emerge.
The first was an elegiac piece of dance theatre created from the rituals associated with the Day of Atonement, and the preparation of a dead body for burial, accompanied by melodies drawn from Jewish choral liturgy, and snatches of inspirational source text. Beautiful, thoughtful, repetitive, meditative, questioning and ultimately tending towards peace. The text we used was from Sally Berkovic’s beautiful book ‘Death Duties’ which you can find here.
The second, a madcap piece of clowning crossed with an obstacle course race, borrowed heavily from gameshows such as Pat Sharp’s Fun House, Countdown and It’s a Knockout to chart the cycle of the year in festivals – laying tables, building huts, throwing sweets, cleaning crumbs, shaking fruit and vegetables, dressing up and doing it all to the frantic strains of seasonal music getting ever faster.
Here is Beatrice’s rendering of the Jewish year in a spiral of festivals:
Using the idea of the clown, ever in the present and each with a specific intention, we set several clowns off on the course together with intentions that counteracted or frustrated one another… and bingo, something deeply playful and comic immediately assumed the rich and complex characteristics of a social system – a family, a community or a society.
These two partner pieces shed light on one another, addressing the same questions, using the same source material, inviting very different perspectives.
In the week we spent together we used the Open Space principles I’d learnt from Improbable:
We created a collaborative, gentle atmosphere in which we improvised, laughed and learnt from one another. Each member of the team had been drawn to the project by their own interest in time and ritual, and brought resonances and talents which made collaboration a true pleasure.
We filled the walls with our questions and realised that the questions were not so much to be answered, as an integral part of the form themselves. Here are some of the questions we stuck up on the wall, and a poster by Beatrice amalgamating them:
We did a sharing for a small invited audience at the Marylebone Theatre in London on July 18th.
Throughout the research and development period we framed the sharing as an opportunity to share our questions about the philosophy and forms with a new group of people, and invite them into our exploration. We prioritised sharing our process rather than preparing a ‘scene’ to show, and the upshot (perhaps not surprising to those who understand improvisation) was that we ended up, sort of by accident, with a moving and substantial piece of choreography for the ‘Death Duties’ piece.
The next stage for this project is still unfolding.
If you would like any more information about Spirit or if you are interested in using Beatrice’s work, please contact me.