Hooves

May 23 2015 | By More

✭✭✭✭✩    Hidden talent

Hidden Door Festival 2015: Sat 23 – Sat 30 May 2015

Echoes of times past creep into Hidden Door with Annie E Lord’s entrancing piece of site-specific storytelling, Hooves.

Lord knows the importance of place and time, anchoring her story with images of earth created with detritus and stamped down into layers of history which archaeologists unearth and interpret.

Anne E Lord Photo: Thom Dibdin

Annie E Lord. Photo: Thom Dibdin

The specific history relates to the old King’s Stables Yards. It is the place where this year’s Hidden Door happens but also, and more pertinently to her telling, in medieval times it was home to jousting and, in later times, smithies and stables.

Evoking these real places and events, Lord tells of horses and their hooves. The hooves a combination of living and dead material, their sensitive connector to the ground which, shod, ride over everything with equal feeling, clattering over cobbles, thudding along muddy towpaths.

Lord clips her halter on to the flight of Jack Foley, inventor of the profession of the foley artist. It is their sonic lies on which she dwells, the facsimile of reality epitomised by the clopping of cocoanut shells over prepared ground.

It’s a wonderfully tight piece of writing, only 15 minutes long, but given a direct matter of fact delivery that allows the imagination to fly with her to different places and tell us something about the reality, or not, of where we are in the world.

It would be good heard anywhere. But delivered here, in the Peely Room, with the jousting grounds buried in the layers of mud under the audience’s feet, it becomes site-specific storytelling of the very highest order.

Running time: 15 minutes
Hidden Door Festival 2015: Peely Room Theatre
The Old Street Lighting Depot, King’s Stables Road, EH1 2JY.
Saturday 23/Sunday 24, Tuesday 26, Friday 29Saturday 30 May 2015
Sat/Sun, Fri/Sat: 3pm; Tue: 8pm and 9pm.

ENDS

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