VOID

“Meet Alan and Barbara, age-old monsters spawned at the beginning of time. They gorge on prawns and garlic, timeless spirits inhabiting flawless teenage body suits.”

A monologue exploring the silent, insidious nature of carried trauma and how formative experiences shape us.

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Produced by RIFT and Queen Mary University at VAULT Festival, Feb 14th – March 25th 2018, directed by Felix Mortimer.

RIFT placed two freight containers outside VAULT Festival. Inside them two one-on-one performances. Written by Annie Jenkins and Joe Kerridge these stories were born from conversations about harassment, abuses of power and gender. One of bath bombs, quavers, an adolescent relationship that has left an indelible mark. The second looks back from the future on the toxic nature of masculinity. 

Winner of the VAULT Innovation Award.

Some thoughts on VOID by Eli Cummings

Hearing a monologue alone in the dark is a unique and disorientating experience and one which, counterintuitively, made me more aware of my physical self: my body, my expression, my reactions. The content of this monologue, essentially a disclosure of historic sexual assault, would generally elicit a set of responses from me – a sympathetic widening of the eyes, a shake of the head, an exasperated exhalation . . . Alone and in the dark, however, those recourses were denied to me. Or maybe they just came less naturally. Instead of expressing my sympathy, frustration and discomfort in any external way, I kept quiet and still, swept up in the wave of the disclosure. When I left the shipping container and returned to the light, I found myself wondering whether my well-rehearsed set of reactions might be wholly performative – whether it’s just easier to conjure expressions of dismay for an audience than it is when you are isolated. But that’s not quite it. There’s an undeniable sincerity to these reactions when they are directed towards a victim. When you are alone, however, there is only blankness and silent resignation. This applies, I think, whether you are literally alone, or experiencing the kind of emotional detachment and isolation that comes from being a victim of an unwanted encounter of the kind described. You go through the motions blankly, “because you’re already there and it’s easier just to get on with it”.

In a strange way, entering the next shipping container felt like an act of complicity; the setting and the monologue marked it out as a specifically male space. The transition between the two pieces made this dynamic hard to avoid – from a woman reflecting on a boy’s sexual aggression, to a man reflecting on his own sexual aggression against a girl. The atmosphere in the second container felt relaxed, almost jovial, and this too was conspicuous after the intensity and darkness of the first. This all contributed to a general reluctance to identify too closely with the speaker of the second monologue. I wondered whether this was to do with the fact that the “games” central to both pieces are necessarily gendered. Whether, as a woman, I can feel anything but suspicion about a man’s self-exculpations, no matter how well-intentioned. Or, alternatively, whether my instinctive feelings were grounded in the fact that one speaker was a victim, one a perpetrator. Either way, as he articulated his journey toward self-awareness, my predominant emotion was hostility. It was impossible not to hold him up as a paradigm of entitled manhood; I couldn’t help but think that the posture of contrition in which he ends his monologue, kneeling down to speak to a tearful woman, was insufficient redress for all the girls who have been pushed to their knees and against walls. . .