‘Performance’, wrote the great theatre director Peter Hall, ‘always has to have the equivalent of a mask in order to transmit an emotion’. In her performance in the forty-five-minute monodrama A Grammar of Distance, created for and with her by composer Kari Watson and to be premiered at hcmf// on Saturday 21 November, Rosie Middleton will be exploring the limits of this maxim.
Originally titled The Masks We Wear – including when it was workshopped at London’s IKLECTIK venue in January this year – A Grammar of Distance explores the body’s potential for recontextualization via electronic, musical and theatrical interventions. It stems, says Watson, from the two musicians’ ‘shared interests in embodiment, vocality, identity, and the politics of performance on marginalised bodies’. As Watson and Middleton explored these interests in the early stages of developing the work, they arrived at the idea of forms of masking, ‘whether a vocoder, a lighting cue or even an internal game that allows Rosie to negotiate a complex passage of music without the audience knowing’. All such devices, continues Watson, ‘present opportunities to explore agency and create conditions that allow the gaze to be directed, controlled and manipulated’.
Photo © Bobby Shoebotham
Motivated both politically and artistically, Middleton frequently places her body and its limits as a stimulus for her work. In this, the identification and exploration of moments of on-stage vulnerability have been key. This is most evident, perhaps, in 12HOURS, an all-day, one-woman performance created with Catherine Kontz and premiered at the Rainy Days Festival in Luxembourg in 2024. Taking endurance itself as a performance parameter (Middleton remains on stage, alone, for the duration of the work), it tests the performer’s ability to maintain their masks: to remain in unbroken character no matter what. Meanwhile, PLASTIC BODIES, a co-creation with Amy Bryce, Sarah Parkin, Maya-Leigh Rosenwasser and Catherine Valve – part of which was performed, as Use of Plastic May Cause Suffocation, as an hcmf// short in 2023 – exposes the abused vulnerabilities of young singers being trained in the opera industry, experiences that the classically trained Middleton shares with all too many of her colleagues. ‘In that very formal classical training, a woman’s body is really not her own’, she says of operatic singing in general. The emotional impact of the role might depend on accessing deep wells of human empathy, but this is achieved via a potentially harmful severity of practice. ‘You embody these deeply vulnerable, deeply traumatised roles on stage, but there’s a difference between the vulnerability expected of singers onstage and the lack of humanity around physical and mental illness – real human vulnerability – offstage’.
Video still from A Grammar of Distance
And yet, as Peter Hall describes it, the intersection of relationality and masking is the essential juncture of theatrical experience. ‘Everything I do is related to humans in space to some extent’, says Middleton. ‘I think 12HOURS really heightened that because when there was no audience, it was very, very difficult. And when people came back in, the energy shifted.’ She makes a comparison to those moments in the theatre when the fourth wall is dropped, or when you appear to make eye contact with a performer at a rock gig. ‘I like the intimacy of that. But also a lack of intimacy really interests me. I can be deeply vulnerable on stage in a way that I wouldn’t be in life outside, because there’s this theatrical framing around it. There’s an intimacy with the audience, but it’s protected by the theatrical framing.’
All musical performance, but perhaps singing most of all, creates a stylised relationship between musician and audience. In the dramatic arts, the masks of which it is made are clear enough: costumes, scenery, perhaps even literal masks. They are less overt, but no less present, in music, in the form of the score, the instrument, the precision and strictures of music-making itself. With A Grammar of Distance, Middleton and Watson show us where some of them are and, perhaps, let them slip a little.
Profile by Tim Rutherford-Johnson
Tickets for the World Premiere of A Grammar of Distance are now on sale here.