Simon Starling "At Twilight", The Common Guild, Glasgow until September 4. www.thecommonguild.org.uk
WORDS lie at the heart of Turner Prize winning artist Simon Starling's ambitious new project, At Twilight, which opened last weekend at The Common Guild in Glasgow's west end. More than an exhibition, Starling has worked with theatre director, Graham Eatough to create a multilayered cultural experience.
It all revolves around a WB Yeats play, At the Hawk’s Well, written and first performed in April 1916, in what Starling describes as “an odd cross-cultural mash-up in an English garden, at a traumatic moment in European history”. Imagined as a play, the exhibition aspect presents a rich array of associations and remarkable stories.
Yeats wrote At the Hawk's Well when he was working with poet Ezra Pound. Inspired by traditional Japanese Noh theatre, it is a fusion of Irish folklore and what Yeats then saw as an exciting new possibility for theatre.
Starling’s project coincides with the centenary of the play’s first appearance, in the middle of the First World War. This "war to end all wars" and its attendant devastation is evoked in the exhibition by a group of "blast trees". These highly figurative stands, on which Starling exhibits a series of masks, take the form of charred, black tree trunks, echoing the "blasted landscapes" of foreign fields in which thousands of soldiers died.
The performance aspect of At Twilight moves to Holmwood House on the south side of Glasgow for August 26-28. Described as "a play for two actors, one dancer, eight masks (and a donkey costume)", masks again play a key role.
It will also include The Hawk's Dance, specially devised by renowned choreographer Javier de Frutos, working with Scottish Ballet and dancer Thomas Edwards – presented on film and accompanied by live music from Chicago-based musician, Joshua Abrams and Natural Information Society. See the Common Guild website for booking details.
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