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| Louise Ann Wilson Company |
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Louise Ann Wilson is a performance maker, scenographer and director working nationally and internationally to create site-specific performance that explores the relationship between landscape and place and human life-events.
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Productions and Projects
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The Gathering / Yr Helfa
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2014
The Gathering / Yr Helfa, is a new site-specific walking-performance revealing the day-to-day and seasonal workings of Hafod y Llan, a 'true hill farm' located on the foothills of Mount Snowdon. The performance will take participants on a circuitous journey tracing a six-kilometre route through the landscape and into the farm. As they walk they will experience installations, performance, film, poetry, music and sound as well as real-life happenings.
Louise Wilson was invited to create the performance work with the National Theatre Wales. It has evolved over the last three years through observing life at Hafod Y Llan. This process enabled her to work with the shepherds and log their activities; spend time in conversation with individuals who have lay and expert knowledge of the farming cycle and the reproductive biology of sheep; to study maps, field-names and topography; and speak with local residents with inter-generational memories of the farm.
Louise is collaborating with the team at Hafod y Llan and Gillian Clarke, the National Poet for Wales, who is writing a twelve-month sequence of site-specific poems for the performance based on the life cycles of the ewes, the flock, the farm and the landscape. Nigel Stewart is working on the choreography and John Hardy Music are composing music and sound. The Gathering / Yr Helfa will be performed by a company that includes the shepherds, their dogs, two hundred sheep, professional performers, an award winning brass band, children from the local primary school and National Trust volunteers. 12 - 14 September 2014 photo: Joel Fildes/National Theatre Wales
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The Gathering / Yr Helfa
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Ghost Bird
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2012
Ghost Bird is a walk and live art installation in an upland valley in the Trough of Bowland, a landscape that is internationally important for its heather moorland, blanket bog and rare birds. Walking unguided and in silence, the audience / walkers will discover installations and inventions made from the materials of the moorland and valley inspired by the upland landscape and in particular the Hen Harrier. Referring to the ghostly grey feathers of the male Harrier and the absence this year of nesting pairs in the Trough of Bowland, Ghost Bird celebrates the beauty of the birds and draws attention to their sometimes fragile existence within the North of England. In doing so, the work also becomes a means of reflecting on the journey taken 400 years ago over the Bowland Fells to Lancaster Castle by the Pendle Witches.
Ghost Bird is created and directed by Louise Ann Wilson with choreography by Nigel Stewart of Sap Dance. It is performed by dance artist Julia Griffin and a team of life-models. The walk covers a 7-mile route with installations sited at the top end of the valley. Ghost Bird is commissioned by Green Close Studios as part of the Lancashire Witches 400 Programme,
co-commissioned by Live at LICA. It has been made with the support of land-owners United Utilities Estates and their tenants, the Forest of Bowland Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, and Hen Harrier experts from the RSPB.
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Ghost Bird
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Fissure
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2011
Editors' note: Fissure was one of three productions shortlisted for the Performance Design Award at the World Stage Design exhibition and conference in Cardiff in September 2013. For the exhibition, 100 artists were selected out of 600 entries from across 52 countries.
Louise Ann Wilson's site-specific work Fissure is a durational performance event, a participatory pilgrimage through the landscape of the Yorkshire Dales over three days, two nights and a 16 kilometre walk.
Wilson is collaborating with the composer Jocelyn Pook, poet Elizabeth Burns, choreographer Nigel Stewart, along with neuroscientists, geologists, dancers, choirs and cavers.
Neuroscientists often use the same language as geologists when talking about brain disorders, of 'caverns' of 'fluid pathways' and 'fields'.
Fissure is Wilson's reponse to the death ten years ago of her younger sister from a brain tumour, and takes its title both from the landscape, with its deep crevice-like scars, and from this experience.
The performance creates a new 'myth' about life, death, grief, resilience and renewal. Fissure took place over 20 - 22 May 2011.
Lynn Gardner previews Fissure in the Guardian. photo: Simon Webb
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Fissure
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Jack Scout
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2010
Sap Dance and Louise Ann Wilson Company devised and presented Jack Scout, a walking performance in which music, dance, voice and art reveal a hidden part of the Jack Scout shoreline of Morecambe Bay.
The audience was led by a Guide through the heath and shoreline, as the performance evoked Jack Scout was performed by dancers Natasha Fewings and Nigel Stewart (co-director, choreographer), vocalist Steve Lewis, instrumentalist Matt Robinson, and Louise Ann Wilson (Guide, co-director, scenographer).
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Jack Scout
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Still Life
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2008
Still Life was an intertidal performance specific to the sands of Morecambe Bay and the shoreline at Far Arnside in Sept 2008 and revised in 2009. Small audience groups were led by a guide from cliff top to sandy shore, over limestone rock and salt-marsh grass. Installations made from objects discovered in situ provided trails for the audience to follow. Along these trails, spectators came across digital recordings, verbal descriptions, cardboard frames placed over natural and man-made objects, and photographs of objects no longer present (such as a dead gull and the sea at high tide). As they walked, a story unfolded concerning a woman from the past whom they witnessed out on the sands, and a weathered washed-up man from the present they beheld dancing on rocks.
Created and performed by: Louise Ann Wilson and Nigel Stewart (Sap Dance)
The project arose from the AHRC-funded project Re-enchantment & Reclamation, Landscape and Environment Programme. It was funded by: Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts (LICA) and the Faculty of Arts and Social Science (FASS), Lancaster University.
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More About
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Louise Ann Wilson was Co-Artistic Director of wilson+wilson (1997-2008), makers of site-specific theatre, whose works include: House (1998), Mapping the Edge (2001), News from the Seventh Floor (2003) and Mulgrave (2005).
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Louise Ann Wilson Company
www.louiseannwilson.com
The Storey
Creative Industries Centre
Meeting House Lane
Lancaster, Lancashire
LA1 1TH
England
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