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THE FICTITIOUS TRUTHS OF THE MAKING OF....

A series of digital documents 

 

The Fictitious Truths of the Making Of... is a practice of creating videos that document, reconstruct, reflect, satirise and re-imagine the performance-making processes of Dog Kennel Hill Project. The idea is to bring into question notions of truth in the way we construct ourselves, by blurring the lines between real and pretend whilst exposing the incongruities of our own stories.

Image credits:Tony Wadham

 

Following a non-linear process we draw on an array of social encounters, interactions and wanderings. Documenting and reconstructing rituals of meetings, journeys, crises, discoveries and absurd playground games of power relations and manipulations. In this series of works, the roles that we play, the behaviours produced and the images that occur, become heightened and are often then re-enacted to produce curious hybrid states of imagined non-fiction and truthful fiction.

 

The Fictitious Truths currently includes the creation of 2 screen works that can be presented in gallery/studio contexts as an installation event or single screen viewings; WE NEED TO HAVE THAT CONVERSATION and DIABOLIC.

 

 

WE NEED TO HAVE THAT CONVERSATION  - video-work

 

documents the process of creating TUG, a performance for the UK waterways between 2010 and 2014. See TUG PROJECT. The project came up against practical, bureaucratic, cultural and interpersonal obstacles, yet these only ever posed as a reason to continue to reach through to some 'other side' where understanding might be possible. It was as though the yielding of a block or the reaching into a void in order to find a new connection became TUG's ultimate point of existing.

PROMO/TRAILER VIDEO for WE NEED TO HAVE THAT CONVERSATION

The work takes inspiration from iconic navigation stories such as Conrad's ‘Heart of Darkness’ and ‘Burden of Dreams’ the making of Werner Herzog's ‘Fitzcaraldo’ in which he attempts to drag a riverboat over a mountain. Although our navigation was only modest by comparison, simply Londoners going to the Midlands, living in a caravan, trying to befriend canal folk, dealing with health and safety officials, the sense of the epic and timeless remains hovering.

video credit:Tony Wadham

WE NEED TO HAVE THAT CONVERSATION is a choreographic interplay weaving images and conversations, performance footage and re-constructed scenes. It is therefore neither authentic nor factual, and both brilliantly performed and badly acted. It reveals the fleetingness of experiences and moments of connection and our desperate attempts to pin them down.

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Image credits:Tony Wadham

DIABOLIC - The Audition Project

 

premeiered in March 2014 is a study on the absurdity in the search for authenticity and truth. In a mocumentary set- up situation a group of performers attempt to please 2 naïve and egotistical directors in their search for the perfect performer, able to reveal their true selves. This is a humerous and confronting study on the anatomy of performance and a celebration of the ability for dignity to exist in the most desperate of rituals. Diabolic was presented at Sadlers Wells Wild Card 2014, Lightmoves Festival 2017 and in the exhibition You Can Probably Turn This into Something at Brighton CCA 2019.

Image credits:Tony Wadham

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