Anna Breckon and Nat Randall

Co-commission with Performance Space and Arts House
Incubator Residency

THIS RESIDENCY WAS PREVIOUSLY TITLED REAR VIEW

Set Piece brings together film and theatre citations, interview material and improvisation to create a 45-60minute work that explores homosexual coupledom through the lens of power dynamics and erotic power play.

Set Piece does not have a strong narrative form but rather builds tension through shifting power dynamics, mobile social hierarchies and vacillating desires. The first half of Set piece explores the couple dynamic as a locked relational form claustrophobically closed off from the world of others. This relation is burdened by history, and too much knowledge, is ambivalent, frustrated, and dependent. However, at the midway mark, enters an outsider who poses an erotic threat and erotic potential to the couple form. The second part of the show navigates the ways in which the couple dynamic shifts with the inclusion of a third party, exploring systems of social presentation, manipulation and erotic power play.

Set Piece will comprise of relational power structures, dialogue and genre conventions from an archive of theatrical and film texts that explore the couple form as their primary point of philosophical engagement.

Through these deidealising portraits of the couple, Set Piece explores the abject nature of sexuality and desire, modes of competition and contempt generated by the immobility of the form, and the ways in which desire and attachment are bound up in broader hierarchical social organizations.

Image: courtesy of the artists