No Woman's Land (Performance)

Abstract

'No Woman's Land' (performance) is 1 hr 15 minute large-scale, multi-media performance work.

In 1945, Ildikó’s grandmother Lucia Rippel, expelled from her place of birth, walked 220 miles across the fractured landscape of Europe, with her two small children and all her belongings dragged in a cart. In 2015, Ildikó and Rosie retraced her footsteps, crossing borders, climbing fences, bleeding, crying and blistering, carrying their flat-pack children.

The performance is a response to our walk and findings, made in collaboration with digital artist Barret Hodgson and musician Matt Marks. The piece uses digitally mapped projection as the two performers (and sometimes audience members) walk on treadmills through past and present landscapes of the post-apocalypse. Drawing from the gallows humour of 1920’s Weimar Germany Kabarett, we are dressed as men to entertain, but also to avoid rape, keep our jobs and keep our children alive.

The duo are accompanied by a live musical soundscore, which draws from the collected sounds from the journey and sets the scene of the politically charged Kabarett acts from the darkened Berlin Bars at the time.

This practice as research project examines the process of transferring the politics of home and displacement and experience of walking into an autobiographical and familial performance (performing with family) through the inclusion of real (hi)stories. In the No Woman’s Land performance the performers re-create the experience as they (and sometimes spectators) walk on treadmills. Through kinaesthetic empathy the audience are affected by witnessing the walking, the breathlessness, the sweat. No Woman’s Land investigates authenticity with a critical poststructuralist perspective: the familial micro-narrative of the grandmother deconstructs phallogocentric views on history often represented through the male war hero, and highlights women’s experience of migration.