Flat Holm Island
No Place Like (Flat) Holm
Llais, Bocs, Wales Millenium Centre
Thursday 27 - Sunday 30 October 2022
Penarth Pier Pavillion
Saturday 15 - Monday 17 April 2023
Lying in the Bristol Channel, just 3km off Lavernock Point (South Wales), is Flat Holm - Cardiff's own mystery island. Its shorelines are studded with secret caves, and its landscape hides stories of survival against all odds. It is a microcosm of Wales’ history. The buildings, remnants of military defenses and a former cholera isolation hospital, echo stories of loss, isolation and grief; a nation defending itself against invasion.
Now operating as a tourist attraction, bird sanctuary and Site of Special Scientific Interest it defends itself against the threat of climate change. Living off-grid and enduring the turn of the seasons across one year, this immersive film captures the story of one woman whose experience of chronic pain ignites a love affair with the island. Isolated and yearning to be heard this is an intimate duet that gives voice to the invisible pain of body and earth.
This filmed site-responsive work deeply inhabits and enlivens the hidden stories of Flat Holm’s landscape, scattered with wildflowers growing through the crumbling remains of centuries of human occupation, re-awakening them in the imagination of the public.
Told through the body and voice of a lone woman in chronic pain, across the cycle of a year’s turn, this is an intimate duet between broken body and damaged earth – the search for home/holm in Flat Holm’s brutal yet beautiful embrace.
Duration - 30 minutes
Runs on the hour and every half hour (see venue for details)
https://www.wmc.org.uk/en/whats-on/2022/no-place-like-flat-holm
Film Teaser
Embodied Creative Site Writing
Research and Development
Develop Your Creative Practice (2019)
Hen Wlad Ein Plant / Land of Our Children (2021)
This project emerged from a Develop Your Creative Practice award (2019) which supported Gina to explore a transition of practice that focused on wellbeing in nature, and used film as a way to negotiate the demands of live performance/touring.
Moving to Wales filming relocated to the shorelines of Lavernock Point where Gina had been making embodied engagements with the landscape. Across the sea lay Flat Holm - an island which had once housed a cholera isolation hospital. Connecting with the island and with her own sense of isolation (experienced through chronic pain), in the midst of the worlds' (the result of a global pandemic), the work was born.
This early film reflects those experiments in landscape, a two-way, collaborative journey made with filmmaker Mathew Beckett (River Rea Films). Together they have devised a truly unique way of working film, one that is "as authentic as it gets" (Mathew Beckett). This organic method is contra to standard film making methods, responding sensitively to performer and landscape - a central ecology of care for both body and earth considered throughout.
Thereafter, working in partnership with National Theatre Wales, Gentle Radical, and Natural Resources Wales, Gina undertook a micro residency on the island engaging in a prolonged stay which formed the basis for the seasonal residencies that followed.
Research and Development
Team
Georgina Biggs
Artistic Director and Performer
Mathew Beckett
Director of Film and Photography
Oliver Wilson-Dickson
Musician
Composer
David Massey
Digital Mentor and Producer
(Bocs, Wales Millenium Centre)
Alan Jones
Support Worker
Royal Marine Veteran/Survival Specialist
Site Writing Audio Editor
(Radio Platfform)
Abigail Fitzgerald
Assistant Digital Producer
(Bocs, Wales Millenium Centre)
Jill Rolfe
Costume Designer
Callum Crawford
Graduate Placement
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