Summary: A live performance. Filmed at the Freud Museum on 30th April 2012. Ghost Track is very beautiful because Claire quite clearly gets into a dialogue with her own biographies so it circles around her as a person but it expands into her field, it has a clear context and expands into space’ Serge von Arx theatre architect and scenographer Berlin A solo performance by Claire Hind, written in collaboration with Gary Winters of Lone Twin, co-directed with Alexander Kelly of Third Angel. Ghost Track is a performance that weaves autobiography with King Lear, and the perennial difficulties of the father-daughter relationship. Claire Hind tells stories about the thoughts and terrors one has when waking up in the middle of the night, about her petrol pump neurosis and her 7 dads, one of whom is her ‘ghost dad’. It is a work that carefully braids humour with the power that fear and anxiety has over us as we lead very busy lives and juggle many roles. This work draws upon the ‘Father’ of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud and thinks about the different ways in which his writing inscribes himself into his work, including his moving paper ‘The theme of the three caskets’ (1913) that takes King Lear and his three daughters as his prime example. Psychoanalysis is used as a compositional strategy to write a space for the performer – and also as a zone in which the playfulness of the performer as storyteller can be explored. Ghost Track demonstrates the slippages that occur in story-telling and uses the Nano pad (a sound sampler) as a symbol of the unconscious mind that disrupts our sense of cohesion, functioning as a buffer zone between play and fear. The material is developed from a series of performance writing workshops that Claire experienced with artist Gary Winters of the international renowned performance duo Lone Twin. They became interested in the repetition of language that occurs in act one scene one of King Lear, Nothing. Nothing will come of nothing and the repetition of the ritual in this act – each daughter coming forward to repeat a similar speech act to their father - and relate this to the death drive and the Electra complex. Kong Lear Super 8mm film Kong Lear is a humorous and touching film referencing King Lear’s madness upon some heath and re-imagining King Kong inside Lear’s psyche as woman. It is an Ubu for the 21st Century – Andrew Head, Hull University. The images of Kong Lear on the screen are beautiful and evocative. One minute she (as Kong Lear) appears playful, the next vulnerable and melancholic, absorbed in a world where nature once stood. Arrested Motion. Kong Lear is a play on words of the two male characters of King Kong and King Lear. We like the idea that Kong is inside King Lear’s psyche and we like the idea that the character of Kong Lear is played by a woman – imagine that… Freud would have a field day! This short film is the B track – the flip side to the live show. We decided to write a piece for super 8mm film to act as if the live show’s material had an unconscious, or a psyche. We are playing with the idea that the id, in Freudian psychoanalysis is silent and we became fascinated about the position of writing on silent film’s intertitles – for us they have the possibility to reveal what is hidden inside the character’s and performer’s psyche. Our playful merging of these two icons produced a string of images, texts and activities that included the filming of the character looking down upon the city of York from the Lord Mayors’ apartment roof, running feral along Fifth Avenue in New York and ascending a climbing wall inside a Go Outdoors store on Foss Island retail park (not Skull island). Lone Twin are currently working on a project for the Cultural Olympiad entitled the Boat Project.
