A REVIEW

Uninvited Guests' Guest House. Arnolfini, October 1999.

Remembering a scene from Blue Velvet. Isabella Rossellini's arms splayed out against the walls as she moves down a corridor with a rhythmic motion. An almost visceral body memory. As though it was a memory of an action my own body had made. Yet when I see it in my mind's eye I find this memory is overlaid, superseded even, by a moment in Guest House. It is not Rossellini, or myself, but Uninvited Guests' performer Jessica Hoffmann, whose body I see make this gesture.

In Guest House, Uninvited Guests engaged with concepts of space and narrative through re-telling the memories of other people they had interviewed. Even the banal details of these remembrances were borrowed, or stolen, for them to embody and inhabit in their oblique repetitions. Throughout their process Uninvited Guests questioned the act of remembering, exploring the structures within which we reminisce and attempt to capture that which is lost.

They explored these memory structures through the structuring of the performance space itself and through projections of virtual representations of the spaces people described. The spatial relationships were complex and in continuous motion, setting up an interface between "real", theatrical space and time and the virtual spaces and times of the computer modellings.

Uninvited Guests pushed their material as far as it would go. Constructing, deconstructing and reconstructing these memories within the grounds of text, performance actions, sound, live video and computer animation. Each element, be it technological or performative, shared the same status and was subjected to the same processes of repetition, cutting and looping. Technicians got up from their computers to perform and performers made lighting changes, adjusted mikes and operated cameras.

Who were these people in their ill-fitting clothes, which tugged naggingly at my associations? I could never quite figure it out as I attempted to unravel them: half-formed thoughts appeared like under-developed photographs, bleached out and tinted with some forgotten nostalgia. Second hand clothes and second hand memories.

Video/digital projections appeared against ever-changing structures of white flats, or screens, and worked as windows, opening into these rooms and their attached memories. Audience and performers alike became voyeurs; the rules of watching constantly shifted. Multiple perspectives and scales were played with, using projections of live link video and 3D models in conjunction with live performers. These performers' bodies became fragmented, cut-up between the live and the mediated such that there was no coherent whole. My gaze flickered constantly in-between, not knowing where to settle or focus: which am I looking at? A performer watching on-stage, the back of a live body; a performer partially hidden behind a screen; a body-detail, magnified and projected larger-than-life; a performer's face, inset in a computer-generated, 3D space and looking back.

We, the audience, were taken through these perspectives which shifted with increasing complexity. We were manipulated throughout as if we too were part of the work's fabric; as though our own memories could be part of the guest house, worked through its strange and altering devices. We became conceptual Peeping Toms, caught in a complicated relationship with watching.

Who were we, this audience who sat in the dark and watched from our seats? What was our role in these events? I was confused by my role, as the ground kept changing. It prompted me to ask myself the questions Uninvited Guests had asked in their research: "Can you tell me about a room?" "What happened there?" In my minds eye I re-visited rooms and spaces from my past. As I negotiated these terrains of memory, my perspective constantly changed and I realised that my remembering too, has multiple viewpoints. I do not recall in a linear way, or from one point of view. As I probe my experiences I turn repeatedly, approaching the same place and time from various directions. There is no penultimate, or absolute recollection, no certain order of events. There is no sense of closure. There is a forgetting that as much informs the remembering as that which is recalled. It is this that Uninvited Guests presented to me. My remembrances accompanied those of the people interviewed, over-layering the performance, as I cast my mind back to childhood rooms and to events that tore sharp fissures into the fabric of my memories.

In Guest House, performers attempted to inhabit spaces from other peoples' memories. They attempted to embody them. They dropped memories and picked them up again. The performers' voices, speaking borrowed memories, were intercut with actual recordings of the interviewees speech; a dialogue between live voices and recorded samples of the original interviews. The personal texts started to inform each other as both Uninvited Guests and we, the audience, made new associations as the material was brought together in various permutations. In this game, "real" spaces and events were played with and restructured. The performers became suspect amnesiacs who presented their "definitive" versions, again and again, differently. Fragments of stories were woven together and repeated, distorting and collapsing only to be reformulated and reasserted once again. This was a falling apart in order to fall together.

The fragmented structure of the piece was fragile, in danger sometimes of collapsing; the performers seemed momentarily lost within the Guest House, relapsing into amnesia. And then it gathered momentum, gathering itself up again into a newly generated permutation. But that was the point, to allow us, the audience, to remain still in this uncomfortable tension, not to give in to our desire for a coherent whole.

Constantly moving, never static, my focus was kept, moving as the material (substance) of these memories became ever more confused and mixed up, disappearing then reappearing. The live performers encountered and moved through the projected computer reconstructions with an increasing franticness. Spaces recurred and the layers built up. Actual and virtual spaces intersected more frequently and in more complex configurations as the performance progressed. Finally, through performer Ben Slater's eyes and gestures we entered within the virtual spaces. A live video projection of him (standing-in for us) was embedded within the computer projection; the 3D spaces were no longer shell-like, but were fleshed-out now, by the material's substance. Verbal descriptions came together with large-scale visual representations and the spaces suddenly seemed, so much more, complete. There was a strange sense of recognition, of déjà vous, as these spaces were revealed again, in an immersive, projected tour. The rooms of the guest house were now a part of my own memory structure.

One of the moments that only live art seems to generate occurred following the performance. One of Uninvited Guests' original interviewees, prompted by the performance, began to describe, once again, his memories of his old classroom and what happened there. The authentic did not stand a chance, rendered secondary by the now definitive Guest House version.

What is remembered of the performance is constantly altered now, by the overlaying of my present. I am revisiting and revising the rooms inside my head, trying out new perspectives, altering their realities and questioning their truths. The texture of my memories, cut with their loops, gaps and fissures.