TERRA NOVA (AmundsenScottOates)

A co-production of OMISSIS Festival of Performing Arts, Gradisca d’Isonzo (IT)
June 2012

TERRA NOVA (AmundsenScottOates) takes as an inspiration the lives and ventures of the Polar explorers at the beginning of the 20th century, which VestAndPage studied in their artist-in-residence in Antarctica in January 2012.

The public enters a dark and silent room. During the next 35 minutes, lights gradually turn stronger and the sound of wind raises from zero to maximum.
The man lies in a transparent bathtub in white, icy liquid. He makes efforts in pulling himself up with a rope on his legs. The woman is covered by a huge black coat, only her hands are visible, which tear hair from her head. As her head exits the coat, it’s bald. The woman requests two persons to help her pulling the rope. They pull it until the man hangs head-over from the ceiling, then they lower it again to make him exit and free from the rope. He moves towards a transparent glass container on the wall. The woman walks the space and falls stiffly and unexpectedly. Some people catch her falling body, others don’t. The man takes five persons one by one to aside him. Watching each other facing a mirror, he asks them to think of the most important person in their life, while he cuts a line on his chest. The woman undresses, inserts her head inside a glass bowl filled with water, raises it up and verses its content over herself. With the bowl on her head she sings a song about love and death, approaching the public showing antique photographs of people whose faces are no more visible. Through the vapor and breath the glass steams up until her face is nearly invisible. The man presses his bleeding chest onto the glass container's wall, dressing up in a bride's gown. The woman opens the glass container and the man, now blindfolded, exits. Both step on a field of ice-cubes, trying to cope a precarious dance on it, slipping, falling, failing, catching each other, until the woman exits to let the visitors touch her iced bare feet, and the man lies down on the ice with his naked torso. In the meanwhile light and sound have raised to a nearly unbearable volume. The man stands up from the ice, the woman guides people to touch his naked back's flesh, it is ice-cold.
They exit saying "I’m just going outside and may be some time," the famous last words of the British Antarctic explorer Lawrence Oates (1880-1912), said to his companions just before he walked out into a blizzard towards his self-sacrificing death during Robert Falcon Scott's Terra Nova Expedition to the South Pole.

http://www.vest-and-page.de/#!terra-nova-amundsenscottoates/c1it0

Photograph by Silvia Profumi, Studio 14