Award-winning Irish choreographer and Dublin Dance Festival Artist in Residence Luke Murphy tells us about The Archivist, the first installment of The Prometheus Project, a series of distinct but interconnected performance installations, which will be developed and presented over three years.
The Archivist is the start of something new - the first step in a big adventure, The Prometheus Project.
The Prometheus Project reimagines Greek myth through a contemporary lens. Prometheus stole Electricity from Zeus and gave it to people. Now in the wake of Zeus' wrath, the population of a small town are preparing for the lights to go out for good.
The project will develop seven individual performances, each one based in one room for a small audience, with a different resident, a different character preparing in their own way. What do you keep with you? What do you prioritise? What will you miss? How do you spend that time and who with?
we do if it actually crumbled?' (Pic: Patricio Cassinoni)
The Archivist is the first of these rooms, a work about a character and their choices, about the world they're in, the change that’s coming and how they’re trying to respond.
After developing seven of these spaces, we'll bring them together, overlapping the narratives and interconnecting the stories, with audiences led through a voyeuristic fever dream or fantasy that feels all too familiar.
When half your audience are there because they've just been surprised by something, it brings a completely different energy.
I like to think about how an audience sees a work. So much of how we watch something is coloured by the expectations we have as we walk into a space. Different spaces carry different expectations. The same way we expect a library to be quiet, or people constantly say seeing a film is somehow 'just different’ in a cinema; different spaces carry different sets of ingrained behaviours and energies.
For an audience walking into a theatre is no different, ‘I’ll sit here, you’ll be there, you’ll do something, and I’ll watch.’ Sometimes that convention needs a bit of a shake. Last year I made a small show that happened on a floating raft. When half your audience are there because they’ve just been surprised by something, it brings a completely different energy. Rather than ‘Ok, here we go, let’s see…,’ there’s a sense of ‘What’s this?’ - a new curiosity or uncertainty in the air.
When the safety of the familiar is gone, the expectations change, the audience energy is out of its comfort zone, there's a new starting point to the experience which means there’s potential for both the performer and the audience.
The Archivist is performed for a very small capacity audience at a fairly intimate proximity, it’s a voyeuristic experience of a person facing a huge change in the world and we the audience get to watch them navigating their sense of responsibility and what they believe in. The closer you watch the more you see.
The myth in this case is a great framework for what feels like a very pertinent question - are we happy with what we’ve built and what would we do if it actually crumbled?
I’m excited to bring the first part of this work into the world and you’re very welcome to join me.
The Archivist will be on 18th - 20th May at Project Arts Centre, for this year's Dublin Dance Festival - find out more here.
