Scenes of Passing Strangeness & Wondrous Beauty

“a sense of the archive as a space in which materials hover somewhere between life and death through the researcher’s desire to resuscitate them, to bring them alive”

A performance that evoked a range of thematic concerns through a tour that conjured traces of the past without settling on a single story. Through a series of images, a range of performance modes, and traces of sound, smells, and other materials the audience was led on a journey through the People’s Palace’s Victorian/ early 19th c. history. […] The piece worked across three main conceptual seams, which were beautifully supported by formal choices and innovations: the problem of the performance archive, the ideology of rational recreation and questions around the processes of constituting ‘public’.

Jen Mitas

Collaborative post-graduate devised theatre work created with Kimbal Quist Bumstead, Rachel Gomme, Caiomhe Mader McGuiness, Ruth O’Brien and Daniel Oliver for and in response to The People’s Palace, Queen Mary Univeristy of London 2008.

Image: Christa Holka