A specially commissioned performance which took place on and around The Fire Station to celebrate Acme Studio's 25th Anniversary and the redevelopment of the building into work/live studios. Snakes and Ladders traced the external signs of an invisible dialogue between mind and matter. On the terraces and balconies of The Fire Station, six performers were accompanied by their virtual/video doubles, which did as they did and mimicked their every action. Soon differences occurred and the doppelgangers began to separate from their fleshy counterparts - they were able to transport themselves from one part of the building to another and even to walk unsupported out into open space, immune from physical danger. Obliged to follow their ghosts, the performers were pushed into increasingly precarious scenarios and situations where vertigo, gravity and accident posed a constant threat. Gradually the building was populated by cloned images and relationships between the two sides became comically confused as the actual mixed with the virtual.
Commissioned by Acme Studios with support from the National Lottery.
"Sometimes a fleshy character will interact with a space which is empty in his or her world but occupied on the screen by another person. Sometimes great pains will be taken to recreate a screen image: after a video character leaps from a high walkway, a flesh performer carries on various items of detritus to reproduce the video image of the aftermath, finally lugging on the 'body' and carefully arranging its limbs in the correct configuration. Somtimes the flesh simply fails to live up to the image. Any significance is for us to determine, and lies not in the actions themselves, but in the differences between the two versions with which we are presented"
Financial Times
