story #1

Story #1 is the first collaborative performance between Rachel and me and the beginning of our interest in the possibilities of radical narrative, spun out of the worlds of TV and fan fiction.

In Story #1 we make the audience watch an episode of a popular reality competition show and veer wildly into the realms of original fan fiction before turning on each other with wicked improvised challenges based on personal details we know about the other.

Rachel Mars and Greg Wohead take Pixar’s 22 Rules for Storytelling and How Stories Make Us Human, make them fuck each other, kidnap the resulting baby and dance out a prophecy of its future life before its barely opened eyes.

A reflective consideration of how and why we construct narrative.

“Imagine a bullfight without the bull: it would be a set of aesthetic manoeuvres, pretty twirls and pirouettes and so on – but there’d be no danger. The bull, crucially, brings danger to the party… that’s what the real is: the tip of the bull’s horn.”
Tom McCarthy

We promise no less than 120 minutes.
We promise real fictional characters.
We promise a plot.
We promise a surprise twist.
We promise a rupture.
We promise an ending.
We promise a rupture.

Maddy Costa, Exeunt:

September 2015. I’m sitting in the main studio in Ovalhouse watching Rachel Mars and Greg Wohead perform Story #1. It’s horrible. Brilliant, scintillating, guillotine catching the sunlight as it falls dazzling, but also horrible. The violence of it, rendered in such needlepoint detail; none of it is shown, and so it’s seen all the more vividly in the mind.