Projects
You Need Me have two new pieces planned for development over the next two years. The Dust Cloud is an exploration of grief in the Victorian era. Using live cello, violin and piano, the company tell the story of a woman who loses her child and finds herself lost in an oppressive of world of mourning rituals. As her husband seeks consolation in Evangelism, she finds herself increasingly alienated from him, and becomes entangled in a dark underworld of trickery and psychic fraud that leads her deep into obsession.
Performed in a site-specific location, part ghost story and part psychological examination of a woman in grief, the piece was originally created as a scratch for the BAC. The company plan to develop it as a full length piece, with a thrilling and unusual use of live psychic trickery based on accounts of Victorian deception by real mediums.
You Need Me are also currently developing Zelda, a one woman show about Zelda Fitzgerald.The self-titled 'first American flapper' and wife of novelist F Scott Fitzgerald, Zelda spent the 1920s cartwheeling through hotel lobbies, jumping into fountains in evening dress and looking, as Dorothy Parker put it, as if she had 'just stepped out of the sun'.
Threaded with frenetic dance, from Charleston to ballet, Zelda explores Fitzgerald's growing battle with mental illness throughout the 30s and 40s, the tangled resentment, jealousy and bitterness of her failing marriage, and the shock of her premature death in a mental asylum awaiting electroshock treatment.
Zelda is the story of a ferociously intelligent woman, her desperate desire to prove herself independently of her husband, and her frustration at finding herself only ever an echo in his works.
The piece is accompanied by three original gramophones playing live on stage, with constantly changing records falling in and out of sync to create an evocative and disturbing portrayal of a woman lost in her own legend.