A poetic dance of forms. A tender contemplation of grief

“A Coworker Asks Me If I Am Sad, Still
& I tell her,
Grief is not a feeling,
But a neighbourhood.
This is where I come from
Everyone I love still lives there.
Someday I hope to raise a family
In a place you could not mistake
For any home I’ve ever been in.
Brenna, she says,

There’s no such thing as an unhaunted house.”
The above poem by Brenna Twohy from her collection, Swallowtail captures the thematic tone of Unfathomable – originally a play and now an art-as-research film that explores the processing of inter-generational grief and trauma by Alex Halligey and Athena Mazarakis.

Water is a conduit and a connector in Halligey’s ritualistic performance. Tissues are blown into ellipses, moulded into bodies and carry the names of Halligey’s ghosts as she excavates personal histories of unprocessed grief traced through her father and
grandmother.

The poetry of the production is in Mazarakis’s direction which creates nuanced harmony out of the work’s imagery, Halligey’s lyrical text and her own measured choreography of movement and the somatic.

This poeticism is interpreted in an intimate and pristine character in the film version by Nicola Pilkington which investigates capturing the theatricality of the stage for the camera.

Time has an effect on the feel of the grieving process. And it has surely influenced the process of Unfathomable and its evolution. Its first iteration was as a stage production at the National Arts Festival (NAF) Fringe programme in Makhanda in 2019, winning a Standard Bank Silver Ovation Award and subsequently featuring in the post-NAF Wits 969 festival. It was filmed for the Virtual National Arts Festival (vNAF) in 2020 where the footage was broken up into episodes. The episodes were later edited into one continuous film for the Vrystaat Arts Festival in 2020.
To know where this newest iteration of the production finds the creators, is to find out what has changed and what has remained the same.

“A lot has changed. Emotionally there’s a lot of processing that has happened for me,” says Halligey who is a performer, theatre maker and researcher.
“What stayed the same and why we’re so struck by doing the film version was how theatre serves as a repetitive ritual – always different but giving you the containment of something that is familiar. That revisiting gives you an embodied sense of where you are at, what you have processed, what you’re still processing as well as new nuances and perspectives of both my personal sense of my relationship with my father, but also reflecting on grief and experiences of loss more broadly,” she says. Mazarakis notes the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.

“One big thing that was different is that we’ve also done this post-Covid. While dealing particularly with Alex’s grief and going into the individual, specific personal stories become universal. What happened with the initial production is that the more you draw down, the more it opens up.

“That opening up really had space to land because we were making the show at a time when there was so much loss around us. There was resonance with the reverberations around that loss and in doing it again. For me personally I had a personal loss in terms of Losing my sister to Covid. So, while the Covid period gave us the opportunity to explore what happens when you translate the theatrical energy to film, through that technical investigation, there’s the opportunity to reflect and meditate on the loss that surrounds us societally,” Mazarakis says.

She is a choreographer, performer, somatic arts educator and embodied mindfulness
practitioner. A key focus of her artistic and scholarly research is the concept of the body as an archive.

For Unfathomable the film, Mazarakis and Halligey brought on the skill and sensibilities of Nicola Pilkington who, as a theatre maker and filmmaker, has a keen interest in
experimenting with hybridising storytelling for the stage and screen simultaneously.
Talking to what they set out to do with Unfathomable, the play and the film, Mazarakis says, “Devising this work with Alex lent into my somatic and embodied approach. And the approach of excavating archive and narrative from the body. This found expression
through spoken and physical language and through imagery, and eventually led to
directing the text in a choreographic way. It all evolved organically”.

The research aspect of the film comes from investigating how to interpret the richness of theatre into a filmic language, and how to capture this embodied receptivity that the stage provides for the camera. Pilkington’s approach is a conversation between theatre and film that is about remediation and intermedial performance.

“Cueing from Athena’s direction, it became about choreographing shots and edits. What I have started expressing is the haptic quality that an image can offer – investigating to what extent can an extreme close-up or a sequence of an embodied performance offers a
somatic experience for the viewer,” says Pilkington.

They shot the film using an iPhone in a handheld mechanism allowing them and Halligey (as the performer) to breathe together creating a poetic synergy of film and theatre from a somatic space. And thereby turning what began as a solitary journey for Halligey on stage, into a duetted ritual on camera.

In terms of what this investigation of translating theatrical energy to film revealed, Halligey is fascinated by how the film offers so much of what theatre does, but in a different way.

“There’s still repetition because of multiple takes. There’s still an arch of a performance but in terms of scenes as opposed to the whole play,” she says.
For Mazarakis the collaboration shifted in the filmic project. Her role as director wasn’t typical of both the theatre and film spaces – directing Unfathomable became about being the guardian of the integrity of the image and content.

The investigation is ongoing for Pilkington: “Usually in my filmic experience, it’s very
hierarchical and masculine in its mode, and siloed in terms of the filming and editing
departments. With this project there was an opportunity to break that down in a way that served the performance and the process in a gentle way.
“There was something significant about shooting on an iPhone. With the smartphone
generally being part of our daily lives, it isn’t as jarring as a camera with a lens can be.

The iPhone offered a lot of flexibility. What was important was how the reciprocity between Alex and I felt less like the camera looking at the performance, but more about the camera being with the performance,” Pilkington says.

 Unfathomable the film opens at The Bioscope (at 44 Stanley Avenue,
Milpark) for a limited release with screenings on July 13, 19 and 20. It can
also be viewed online at POPArt Theatre (http://www.popartcentre.co.za) at
R50 per view from July 14 until until July 30.