Devising Un-Re Strict-ed
Un-Re Strict-ed was borne out of the experience of living, working, moving, loving in the city. We started with talking about our experiences of being restricted: the architecture; the transport; the geography; the social structures and behaviours; our relationships; our expectations and ourselves; all these seemed to have an impact on our decisions and desires.
We each brought different professional experiences: photography, sociology, architecture, engineering, music, and theatre performance. Each member of the group also had a characteristic way of expressing their ideas and feelings – physical, verbal, literary, or practical. Our different backgrounds and ways of expressing ourselves helped to make the devising process surprising and stimulating for us as a group.
Throughout the process, we often had to confront our own and shared limits and limitations. We kept struggling to push ourselves further, to understand, to include, to think, to feel, and at times we stepped back, insisting on staying in our safe ‘world’, pretending that our weak points did not exist. Collision and synthesis. Destruction and creation.
We found ourselves having the need to create rules, roles and structures and impose them on ourselves, but at the same time we felt the need to scrap them completely and strip them down, to demolish them as insufficient and restricting our intuition and expression.
