A performance created as a collaboration between Eleanor Cox and the performance artist Ellen Kydd. Kydd's work is primarily concerned with the tension or 'anima' that is the energy within and between people. 
This performance was in three parts. Starting with a talk and booklet, then a vocal performance that tested the acoustics within the church and created the felt acknowledgement of space. Lastly, the two blindfolded artists responded to each other's movement, felt along the length of the rope. 

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

Text for the booklet:

​

"Let us start with just you. As it is only you here, well perhaps you are with me.

I made this bed.

 

Through this performance ‘we’ have performed as separate entities. ‘I’ have performed as Eleanor Cox.

 

Let us, or you, look at George Perec. He tells us that writing is like sleeping, or the page is as the bed. It is something that happens horizontally across a rectangle that is longer than it is wide. It is also a thing we tend to do alone, or with one other. Last, the bed that you sleep in is yours. As the page that you write on is yours. Other versions are guest beds. not (y)ours. Not where you sleep. I have written for you to read. This space here on the page is the space that exists between us. It is a private and intimate kind of lulling feeling that comes with absorbing yourself into a book or into your bed sheets.

 

But wait. you are not in bed, and alas we are not alone.

Peer out from the cosiness and you can see that there are some other people around you. Some absorbed in beds I have also made - their beds. Others either climbing in or getting out.

For a little while, I therefore ask you to stay in this bed with your head poked out, just enough to peep out at the commotion. So that we can dream privately about the communal.

 

Moving into ‘we’, as getting out of bed in the morning, as moving from reading to speech.

 

“

 

 

we are within this space. 

we are with one another here. 

with everyone else. 

 

the WA is what is felt.

it is a Japanese word for a type of ‘space’.

the way that relationships are affected by the space they’re in.

it's human being

plural and reactive

the church as a feeling.

as it influences the relations we make here. 

the feeling between us.

WA is in our church. 

 

 

But if I am me and you are you, and you have made my bed, how could we ever sleep in it? How could ‘we’ ever fit?

 

Consider the way that your social identity shapes your dreams. It speaks of the space between people and others or objects. It is the space as it influences the human being.

 

In Japanese, ‘ningen’ means ‘human being’.

The ‘nin’/‘hito’ (人) “self”/“other(s)”

 

The ‘gen’/‘aida’ = “between,”.

 

Ningen = self & others, between.

 

Therefore to be a human being is to understand one's 'self' as a self between others and as a realm of others between which selves inhabit.

 

 

 

We are physically separate individuals, belonging to each other.

WA is that 'between' (or nin), as it affects the space.

 

Now it’s time for you to get out of bed."