In this Long Read, Jools Gilson shares the background to the collaborative work ‘Weathering’, which took a lost forest as its inspiration. The audio recording of Jools’ performance is shared in the Grizedale Exhibition: here, Jools recounts the story of its long, long production.
Thinking about this lost forest, this performance and the exhibition at Grizedale, I know that this tangling of time and presence enchants story and place in ways which feel urgent. Because all of this process of being present in front of you or being present in a beautifully shot tree, speaks to loss and the possibility of regeneration through poetic text and play.
In the early months of 2020, I started work on a collaborative multi-screen performance project called Weathering directed by the Dance Artist and Film maker Mary Wycherley. I was asked to be part of the creative team because of my writing and performance skills.
The project was focussed on The Gearagh / An Gaorthadh in West Cork, an 11,000 year-old submerged glacial woodland. When it was felled in the 1950s to make way for the building of two hydroelectric dams, it was the last surviving full oak forest in Western Europe. In 2023, the remains of this river forest survive as stumps emerging from the floodwater. Our initial work involved studio based explorations and visits to The Gearagh itself. Soon after we began, the pandemic halted work for two years, although we did meet online. I continued to write, and when restrictions allowed, I would visit The Gearagh, which is about 30 miles from where I live in Cork City in Ireland. Eventually, the film shoot in The Gearagh was scheduled for April 2022 and the work was premiered just under a year later at Dance Limerick in March 2023. Weathering was a resonant hybrid work with a distinctive exploration of the space between film and liveness. It included film on two screens, live performance / choreography, sound and voice.
The Gearagh is an unsettling place. Villages were evacuated to make way for the flooding, whole communities moved away. The outlines of the cut trees are often black against the reflection of the sky in the water.
There is an older history too – of a place where strangers would lose their bearings – lost amongst rivulet after rivulet – the distinctive ecology of an alluvial river valley. Sometimes there were deer here, and rare forms of plant and animal life. And so I visited alone, often walking out past the place where the village shop used to be, out beyond the haunts of walkers. I took photographs and notes, and then I wrote Tree Felling. Writing this was powerfully bound up in movement, both my own in research trips to the Gearagh, but also speculative history. Whatever else, the ESB (Ireland’s Electricity Supply Board) provided work at a time when it was scarce. These trees were mostly felled by hand, and I combined this with the glistening and discomfort of teenage boys. I wanted to tangle these accidents of history with the overwhelming living complexity of an old-growth oak tree.
A year or so later, I’m driving to the second day of the film shoot for Weathering on location in The Gearagh. I know that Mary would like me to speak Tree Felling whilst walking into the flooded river, amidst the stumps of the old forest.
I’ve brought my wetsuit and wet shoes to put on under my red dress, but even so I’m concerned about the cold. I have to recite my text whilst only being able to do one take because the dress will be getting wet and it’s a chilly April afternoon.
The sound guy wires me up with a microphone and a battery pack concealed under the dress – best not fall over either. It’s a lot, but here I go. I walk into the water and begin to perform. Amazingly, I manage to get through the text and the water, and they’re happy with the take. As I turn towards the camera at the end, a fish jumps close to me.
It’s almost a year later and I drive to Limerick for the premiere of this long-delayed work. Mary had told me that she wanted to work live on two of the texts I’d performed for the shoot – Tree Felling and Pearl Mussel. It’s a strange thing for someone who regularly performs her own writing that it isn’t that easy for me to learn and then re-learn my own text. I record it on my phone, and then listen over and over again as I’m walking to work, or up and down the hallway if I’m at home. For me these processes of walking whilst acquiring the embodiment of voiced text that arose from my body is disconcerting but also delicious. Something of the rhythm of it stays with me. I am less afraid of performance than I was when I was younger, I think because I trust my own body more, and inviting writing back into my flesh is somehow more comfortable.
Dance Limerick is a converted protestant church. When I arrive into busy rehearsals, there are two screens positioned at an angle. I greet the dancers quietly, warm up and wait to be called. I have re-learnt Tree Felling as I have been asked, and soon it is my turn to rehearse. It is only then that I begin to understand what Mary would like me to do. She would like me to perform the first part of Tree Felling live in front of the audience, whilst the film of me entering the water is behind me, but I am out of focus, and the stumps of trees are in focus. There is a certain point where I come sharply into focus as I turn. What Mary wants is for there to be a seamless crossover between my live performance voice / presence into the filmed voice / presence, and it’s only then that I realise that the text I have learnt isn’t going to work for this performance.
When you have one take and it’s an Irish April and you have a wetsuit and a microphone power pack under your dress, your navigation of the script will likely be a bit creative. I’ve been performing for decades and I knew I needed to get a good take in one go, but funnily enough the text wasn’t spoken exactly as I had written it, and so I drove back to Cork from this rehearsal and reflected. I realised that if I was going to conjure a seamless shift between live performance and this filmed performance, the text I had written wasn’t any good to me, I needed the exact text I had spoken on that day when I walked into the river in The Gearagh amidst the ghosts of the old forest. Mary had given me the audio recording from the film, and I listened and listened again and transcribed this, and drove back to Limerick for the dress rehearsal armed with a plan. There was an introductory section that I would speak live to audience, whilst the film played upstage from me, there was another section where I had to be precisely in synchronicity with the film, and there was a section where I left the stage and the Jools filmed in the river finished the text. Because I couldn’t see the film, I could only do this if I had a live audio feed of the original film sound recording played into my ear and because I also needed to have my voice amplified by a microphone to sound qualitatively the same as the film, I’d need two battery packs under the red dress (but no wet suit). We rehearsed, there was much discussion, and we tried it and tried it again. We thought it would work. I’ve never performed with an audio recording in my ear, let alone one that was from a previous on location film shoot. I learnt that during the first section I didn’t have to be completely in synch with the recording, but could use it as a guide, I knew the section where I was about to need to be absolutely in synch, and then the part when I would leave my ghost behind. That evening at the premiere, it worked. There was a magical moment, where voice, writing, presence were somehow blurred between present tense and the past of the recorded film.
Thinking about this lost forest, this performance and the exhibition at Grizedale, I know that this tangling of time and presence enchants story and place in ways which feel urgent. Because all of this process of being present in front of you or being present in a beautifully shot tree, speaks to loss and the possibility of regeneration through poetic text and play.
Read more about Jools Gilson here.
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