Islanders is a performance made in collaboration with Jamie Hammill, Nellie Saunby and Sophie Soobramanien. It explores the construction of island identity at a point when the UK’s relationship to other landmasses and the sea around it is in flux. By collectively expanding and re-staging historically diverse representations of islands that exist in the popular imagination, the performance offers a collage of material to propose critical relationships to states of isolation, political fantasy and the promise of rescue.
The performance builds a composite text from the fluid and dynamic resources of networked media. It weaves together references from cinema, literature, myth and anxious internet cultures. The flattening of hierarchies of these online archives allow Shakespeare’s indigenous island inhabitant Caliban to speak through a teenage gamer traversing the tropical islands of Far Cry 3. At other moments a generic castaway performs plaintive auto-tuned versions of the songs of Simon and Garfunkel, a drone records an anthropomorphic coconut walking over the desolate beaches of England’s North East coast and politicians, novelists and monsters speak simultaneously.
Islanders aims to embody these wildly varying human experiences through choreographies, music, text and moving image to critique the alienating ideological positions that are shaping a hastily assembled British island identity. At the heart of the project has been a desire to let the material speak through the relationships in its various elements. Rather than offering an instructive or didactic position on the subject of the UK’s changing island identity, the work hopes to facilitate critical approaches from its audiences.