LANWest (Live Art North West) : I Made You A Submarine

I Made You A Submarine

Show duration: 1 hour
Number in company: 6
Get-in time: one day
Type of work/venue/location: Small to mid range,
Available to tour: Autumn 2009

“I made you a submarine reminds me that contemporary performance does not always have to be cold and unmoving, but can insist on a mode of emotional contemplation and experiential accumulation that can not be deduced through a purely conscious activity. There is certainly a discovery to be made, and the freedom which Napoleon never realised can be appreciated as you struggle to make sense of the disparate images, sounds, movements, and sensations as they collide around the stage.“

Kevin Egan for Total Theatre

I made you a submarine is a multi-layered devised theatre performance that begins with Billy the Kid’s dying friend Charley Bowdre and ends by the seaside with a lobster, a mermaid, a sailor, Napoleon Bonaparte and the mysterious arrival of a submarine.

The performance takes its staring point from Johnston’s desire to carry off Napoleon from his prison island of St. Helena by means of a submarine. From here on it unfolds as a poetic reflection on ambition and failure, action and immobility, life and death.

This new piece conceived and directed by Swen Steinhauser (formerly Deer Park) and developed in collaboration with six performance artists (Alice Booth, Simon Bowes, Neil Callaghan, Simone Kenyon, Anna Wilson, Anthea Lewis), uses movement, fragments of text, audio-visual images, fragmented narratives and rhythmical structures to construct a world in which ideas, landscapes, forces and sensations float and circulate.

Read review in PULP here

Hauser

Contact: Swen Steinhauser
E-mail: steinhauser5@gmx.net
Website: www.hauserperformance.com/

Hauser is the name of performance work under the artistic direction of Swen Steinhauser (previously Deer Park).

Swen studied Theatre at Dartington College of Arts (99-2002) and since worked as the artistic dirctor of Deer Park. Deer Park’s first performance ’see you swoon’ won the Best Devised Piece award at the NSDF 2002, was invited to the National Review of Live Art, Glasgow as well as Junge Hunde Festival, Antwerp, and toured widely in the UK. The company continued to produce the touring studio production (years, years, 2004) and a site specific performance walk through the forests of Grizedale and Leigh Woods (The Forest Project, 2005). Swen also collaborated on the site specific performance ‘Taking Ground’, a sited interactive performanc project in Bristol’s Floating Harbour,

Swen is currently based in Manchester, UK. Over the last three years he has been working as a part time lecturer and visiting artist at MMU Cheshire, Leeds Metropolitan University, Leeds University and Salford University. As part of this work he has produced two significant large cast student productions (Surveillance, 2007 and Splendour/Pleasure, 2008) that were presented at the Manchester International Student Festival 07 and Live 08 (greenroom, Manchester) as well as a variety of smaller scale projects with students on BA and MA level.

hauser makes work that is situated somewhere between Devised Theatre, Dance and Live Art.

The work assemble movements, actions, objects, design, music, literary text, sound, fragments of narrative and structures into atmospheric, sensual images that are full of surprising emotional and intellectual associations. The performances construct field situations in which ideas, desires, narratives and landscapes float and circulate.

The work oscillates between narrative and non-narrative approaches towards the construction of performances.

It is at times concerned with non-narrative task based actions, mundane or splendorous displays, musical structures and the self referential in performances that are attentive towards and reflective of the situation of performance as event.

At others it is concerned with more or less fragmented narratives and an abundance of signified sources often taken from literature, film, history and popular culture in order to construct wild narratives full of juxtaposed multiplicities, wholes, gaps, leaps, jumps and suspensions in order to render visible the non-narrative content of performance (e.g. of time, space, rhythm, sensation). These performances are often informed by a playful poetics of desire and longing.

Both strands of the work constitute open fields rather than closed narrative or thematic systems – they invite an audience to actively participate in the reading of the work.