Tramway, Glasgow
Four stars
The silence, when it comes at the end of Melanie Wilson's hauntingly
intense multi-media monologue, speaks volumes about how much Wilson's
unique oeuvre is about sound as much as vision. Wilson enters in
darkness, sitting behind an antique kitchen table on which sits a
laptop, a microphone and other electronic kit from which Wilson
generates and performs her intricately controlled soundscape that
accompanies her ornately chosen words. Such a set-up hints at how past
will meet present in what follows, with Wilson's words delivered into
the microphone with a cut-glass precision that turns her voice into
another instrument.
Wilson's first-person narrative is told by Vivien, a photo-journalist
trying to get her head together in the country following her
experiences in a middle-eastern war-zone. In the solitary cottage she
confines herself in, she finds a journal written by her great-great
grand-mother in the summer of 1899. At the same time, Vivien becomes
equally haunted by a woman she met in the middle-east, and who, despite
the woman being hidden behind a burka, she became friends with until
the woman is hunted down and rounded up just as much as the fox who
scratches at Vivien's door, also seeking sanctuary.
This is accompanied by the sumptuous film projections of Will Duke, who
puts Wilson up hill, down dale and besides rocks and streams as
disembodied chorales and noises from the natural world complete the
picture. Beguilingly told, Wilson's story is a delicately woven yarn
that's part ghost story, part purging and part emancipation as Vivien
rediscovers her voice through the women who went before her in this
quietest of call to arms imaginable.
The Herald, September 27th 2013
ends
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