Eating earth from home
My background is a series of displacements and expatriations which cannot ever be recuperated ... the fact that I am always in and out of things, and never really of anything for very long. While I was intrigued and delighted by Jude Walton's latest performance, Eating Earth from Home, I felt somewhat perplexed by this new work- one which I knew to be, however well developed, presented as a "work in progress". The work's third part, rich and dense, seemed at odds with the other two sections of the piece, and I found myself examining the structure in an attempt to grasp the overall sense. Until, that is, I realized that it is the structure itself which bore witness to the act of viewing, to the act of performance.
I should explain: in the installation performance, Walton created three sections, LARK, PASSAGE 11 and ENOUGH, which one experienced sequentially . The first was a sculptural/audio piece: scrubbed white chairs suspended above cones of flour in a blue room, the sounds of boat masts tinkling through it suggesting movement, breezes, water. PASSAGE 11 engaged the audience to varying degrees after having begun when three dancers started a series of crossings, of "passages" in the corridor- like room which was chained off adjacent to LARK. Here, the audience was unsure about how to crowd in, how to watch, and half of them remained outside watching snippets on a monitor, busily chatting. Following this section, the audience was ushered through to the third section ENOUGH-a move from difficult viewing to seductive spectacle.
But Walton played with this very confusion, offering us both parallels to, and an understanding of, the work as a whole