Warning, this post could be said to contain spoilers. If you intend to go see Mapping the City, don’t read this. In fact, don’t read anything about it, or talk to anyone, just go not knowing, like you do into each day.
A character watches himself speaking boldly about politics and love, knowing how much pain both will give him.
There are some moments in our lives that can seem more 3D, when the world seems to swing around us. The wave of nausea when you find out your partner has been cheating on you, the moment you smell the scent of someone you once loved, the first time you hold a child that belongs to you, or the moment that your car is hit by another. Time shifts in these moments, the air takes on a consistency like treacle or glue; you feel what a phenomenologist might call ‘the thickness of experience’, I think, when a thing like this happens to you.
The contents of couple’s hearts, as tall as a building, projected onto a wall several stories high behind them.
Mapping the City from the brilliant Slung Low is a piece performed by many performers across the city of Hull. Sometimes following mic’d up speakers, or being guided by workmen holding orange umbrellas, all the time hearing the sounds through a pair of headphones and transmitted to the small card-sized receiver worn around each audience member’s neck.
Like retracing your steps in a town you used to live. Remembered, alien.
A culture sunk in mediums that can be paused, rewound, fast forwarded, altered, cloned, undone, is a culture obsessed with the fake, ruled over by the repetition. What Mapping the City makes you to do is to reverse the question; is that fake? becomes is this part of it?, you don’t ask ‘is this a lie‘ but ‘is this this moment’s truth‘? The performance made you hyper-aware of every figure, each vehicle that sped past, the seemingly discarded object; all has relevance, all a reason.
Three people stood watching you, holding softly lit lanterns. Continue reading Mapping the City
