Performing Stories of Alienation and Disaster

This body of work brings together fictional and non-fictional accounts of various natural and technological disasters to explore our relationship with the natural world and the invented world. The traditions of storytelling that include the folk ballad, the broadside sheet and the disaster film are brought together to question how we consider the status and value of apparent fictional and non-fictional accounts of disaster. This specific performance combines the narratives of fictional accounts of maritime disaster with the folk storytelling tradition, based on real accounts but immortalised as agenda led tales of heroism. The performance included new video work filmed on the Queen Mary liner, Long Beach and the model ship SS Poseidon, part of the collection of the Los Angeles Maritime Museum. Both the Queen Mary and the model SS Poseidon were used in the disaster film The Poseidon Adventure (1972: Ronald Neame).