Tuesday 15 May 2012

Key note: Claire Hind & Gary Winters

KONG LEAR

Claire and Gary collaborate as writing artists on live performances for the city their collaboration encounters the relationship between writing, play and performance and the possibilities of slippage between the self and character. Claire Hind is a performer, researcher and lecturer at York St John University and Gary Winters is the co-artistic director of the internationally renowned company Lone Twin a company with a 15-year history of performance making practices.        

      www.clairehind.com          www.lonetwin.com 

The artists will offer a talk illustrating their practice and sharing footage of the 12-minute Super 8mm silent film of Kong Lear that Claire Hind and Gary Winters made during the Gorilla Mondays tour: Gorilla Mondays are performance walking tours remapping a city through the merging of the two stories of King Kong and King Lear where the public can join the character Kong Lear on her tour of different city sites that playfully psyche-map the streets of our imagination and call upon our dreams. 

Kong Lear as well as a play on words, is a humorous and touching film referencing King Lear’s madness upon some mythologised heath. We re-imagine Kong inside Lear’s psyche wandering the streets of York. Kong Lear is played by a female performer who comes with her own story - Freud would have a field day! We celebrate alternative interpretations in art making practices through the use of old technologies. Kong Lear slips, occasionally, into a narrative about the material quality and the aesthetic of super 8mm film with silent movie intertitles revealing a hint of what is hidden inside the character’s and the performer’s unspoken thoughts and desires.