Bluets
December 2016
“Radical in a quite unexpected and exciting way.”
Devised as part of the Drama and Performance Final Year Performance Projects, Lisa Peck explored the prose poems by Maggie Nelson for a production at Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts.
Bluets involved research into the science of colour, vision and memory.
In particular the ways that developments in neuroscience help us to understand links between perception, emotion and experience.
Bluets asks the questions: How do we heal? How can we move forward together?
Mirroring Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Colour in the way it is structured as a series of 240 numbered fragments, the devised production examined the colour blue and ‘blue-ness’ from a wide variety of perspectives. In the process to translate Bluets for stage the company looked for patterns in these fragments, whilst staying true to the order of the original text. Ripples of repeated dualisms emerged – light/dark, pain/pleasure, hope/despair, seeing/not seeing – which informed the ways the work was staged.
