"Some stories are treason, some are dreamy, some are brutal, some are too funny to believe, some are too painful to tell straight, some are magical and others are poorly made, some might be the honest truth, and some are beautiful but hard to remember. A narrative is a slippery thing."
Kate McIntosh werkte met vijf schrijvers samen voor de tekst van haar nieuwe performance Loose Promise. Ze gaf alle schrijvers dezelfde narratieve ingrediënten om van te vertrekken, maar vroeg elke schrijver zijn eigen versie van het verhaal te schrijven. Het resultaat is een verzameling van mooie, moeilijke en meeslepende vertellingen. De verhalen zijn met elkaar verbonden door hun gemeenschappelijke oorsprong, maar gaan heel verschillende en verrassende richtingen uit. De overlappende vertellingen in Loose Promise creëren werelden die weerklinken in elkaar, maar toch ook niet samen kunnen bestaan. Ondertussen onderzoekt de performance, ontstaan door deze fascinatie van de complexiteit van verhalen, onze drang om ze te blijven maken en verteren...
Op scène legt de solo performer deze vertellingen terug samen. Ze laat de gebeurtenissen die ze vertelt in haar lichaam verblijven en ze gebruikt beeld, bewegingen en objecten om fragmenten van de verhalen die ze vertelt tot leven te brengen. De verschillende versies en try-outs stapelen zich op op scène, al naargelang de verhalen zelf opeenhopen en balanceren in onwaarschijnlijke combinaties. In Loose Promise bestaat het werk zowel uit het vertellen van als het luisteren naar een verhaal - het aangename werk van woorden, en het creatieve werk om verschillende werelden te laten botsen en in elkaar te laten verstrikken.
Intussen vraagt McIntosh zich in deze vernieuwende performance af wat de verhalen die we hebben met ons doen, aangezien we ze in onze mond, onze gedachten, onze herinneringen binnenlaten.
De betrokken schrijvers zijn Tim Etchells, M. John Harrison, Deborah Levy, Richard Maxwell en Jo Randerson.
"A clever colourful lesson in storytelling" (04/02/2009, Der Standard).
"...Kate McIntosh caused a stampede of anticipation with Loose Promise in the smaller confines of Tramway 4. This is solo storytelling that soars and pounces, tickles you into hoots of laughter, then teases you to tears, with McIntosh's huskily persuasive voice luring you inside her jigsaw of incidents. She'd invited various writers to fashion text around some set images, then set herself the task of melding their responses into a panorama of identifiable fears, fantasies, urges and hidden-away secrets - all heightened by astutely selected objects and actions. All done with a lightness of touch that left you surprised at how intense, how forceful, this word- spinning was" (17/02/2009, The Herald, Scotland).
"Kate McIntosh is telling us something. Aspire to something more beautiful in a kaleidoscope of stories. In her current work, Loose Promise, the subject matter is storytelling. She gave the same narrative elements to five authors, including Tim Etchells und Richard Maxwell, from which to write a story. On stage the performer weaves them into a loose carpet. After the end of the great narratives, on today's stages the micro-stories, torn-up narratives and
scraps of stories grow into impressive experiences.... Often these are multiperspective storytelling strands, which at best come together in the mind of the audience to form a shimmering kaleidoscopic whole, enriched by the chameleon-like nature of the performer who slips from one character to the next" (Journal Frankfurt issue 5/09).
"The watering can makes words fluid: Loose Promise by Kate McIntosh at the brut theatre. The deconstruction of texts used to be a complex affair. Now it is enough to throw the written A4 pages into the shredder. And then, best of all, to finish off by turning on a fan and pointing it at the shreds of paper. The artist Kate McIntosh, born in New Zealand and now living in Belgium, is the creator of precisely this kind of postmodern joke which she is now "telling" for the first time in Vienna, in the brut co-production theatre. Namely: how should one tell functioning stories in the theatre today, in times in which faith in the harmonious whole has been removed, times which call for multiperspective thinking, and times of disintegrating realities? This is being attempted as part of the brut "Telling Time" season. Kate McIntosh asked five colleagues, including stars such as Tim Etchells and Richard Maxwell, to weave a story of their own from a few fixed narrative elements. In her eloquent solo performance Loose Promise (performed again on Thursday at 20:00 in the brut Künstlerhaus, with public discussion) she brings the individual strands, each with a life of their own, into an integrated form – and at the same time shows the failure of this process. Under the flow of rain from a watering can which splashes down on her, the pieces of text slip through her fingers; at another time she loses the floor beneath her feet, on a metaphorical level, and topples over bleeding next to her microphone on the soft green carpet. Kate McIntosh plays through the plots, puts puzzles into new contexts, combines picture statements with word statements, and switches between levels as a presenter of herself and a re-teller of the story" (04/02/2009, Der Standard).
"In her performance Loose Promise Kate McIntosh is putting in question the act of speech as a place of power - subverting its coherence and constructing narratives that are broken and re-mixed in a such a manner that we can feel invited to "repair them" on a same footing with the performer.
In her performance the stage is not a privileged platform from which she is authoritatively addressing the public, but a vulnerable and fractured place of encounter, which we are invited to inhabit through the use of our own imaginations" (Igor Dobricic - Volume, May 2008, publication of Gasthuis/Frascati, Amsterdam).
