The Walled-Up Woman: Live Performance at the Extremes
What if the future of performance isn’t on a screen? What if live performance needs to concentrate on the local? As cities empty, what if the only viable venues are regional, suburban and rural? Add to that, what if the strangeness of the historical past, rather than the ambient noise of the moment, is best suited to encountering whatever the future holds? The Walled-Up Woman was a 50-minute workshop performance about an anchoress performed before a live audience in September 2020 at the South Lookout, Aldeburgh, Suffolk, IP15 5BS, part of Caroline Wiseman’s Time and Timelessness project. Anchoresses were medieval women (c.1400) who voluntarily had themselves walled-up at the sides of churches, seeing the altar through a squint window, praying and daily enlarging their graves within their cell. Edging on the North Sea, the venue opened straight out onto the beach; holidaymakers strolled past, pausing to watch safely through the Outlook’s wide-open double doors. After the privations of lockdown, the tiny invited audience were keen to articulate their responses. The Walled-Up Woman developed from Lock’s prescient solo show, Lady in a Veil, about Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the woman who brought smallpox variolation (the precursor to vaccination) to Britain from Turkey in the 1720s. It toured similarly unorthodox venues in England in 2019, including regional museums, libraries, hotels and stately homes. For the audiences who attended, the struggle for vaccines will have been historicized long before Covid-19. Again, post-show discussions, providing the opportunity to articulate responses, were key features. The overall question raised is "As central urban areas vacate, might carefully calibrated live performances in provincial and rural areas, accompanied by participatory discussions, best serve the needs of pandemic era performers and audiences alike?