PREMIERE: AUDIO WORK
21-30 May 2021 on demand (30mins)
Best experienced on headphones - please read the note from the artist below before listening.

ACCESS: This is an audio work with no visuals. A transcript is available to download here.

Dear audience member,

Welcome.

Take however long you need to set up this audio and to settle in to where you are.

This performance is best experienced on headphones. If you don’t have access to headphones, it’s best experienced through speakers of as high a quality as possible.

You’re invited to be alone – alone with yourself, a support worker or care giver, or perhaps with a human or animal companion. Choose somewhere that you will not be distracted or disturbed, where you can let yourself experience this performance. If you wish to be inside, choose a room where you can relax. If you wish to be outside, choose a place where you feel safe and at ease.

Throughout this experience feel free to place yourself in ways that are most comfortable for you – you might sit, stand, lie down, lean, move around, make noise, close your eyes. You could be in your bed, in a bath, on a mat, in a wheelchair, on a sofa, in the sunshine, in a city, in the countryside, in a park, on a bench, or somewhere else. You can change between positions, and between stillness and moving, at any time. If the content of this performance becomes too much, you can stop it, and return to it if you want at another point. You can pause and start this recording whenever you wish.

You do not need to be a polite audience member. You’re invited to do what is most caring for your body and mind. This space does not merely accept you but needs you to be you for it to be itself. This space shakes its head at pressure and judgement. It wants another way. It’s a space to rest into your body, to acknowledge yourself however you are, and to settle in to the richness of listening to pain.

Written and performed by Sarah Hopfinger
Sound design and composition by Alicia Jane Turner
Dramaturgy by Laura Bradshaw

Produced and funded by Take Me Somewhere and Platform, with support from Creative Scotland, The Work Room and Battersea Arts Centre.

Pain and I is a bold and intimate audio piece, exploring the complexities of chronic pain experience through autobiographical text, sound and music. Sarah Hopfinger has lived with chronic back and neurological pain for 18 years, and has largely related to her pain as a barrier to her life and work. For this performance she turns towards her pain as a creative collaborator, exploring it as an unwanted life partner and intimate companion. Pain and I playfully and unashamedly acknowledges the hardships and celebrates the richness of living with chronic pain.

Pain and I originally existed as a choreographic studio performance for a live audience - this audio piece develops the work in a new direction, inviting the listener to reflect on what it means to care for our bodies, ourselves and each other in times of personal and collective pain.

Sarah Hopfinger is an artist-researcher whose work sits between live art, choreography and performance. Her work spans solo performance, intergenerational collaboration, ecology, queerness, and crip practices. Her work has been presented nationally and internationally with organisations such as South London Gallery, Battersea Arts Centre and Earth Matters on Stage (USA). www.sarahhopfinger.org.uk

Alicia Jane Turner is a composer and sound designer working across contemporary theatre and new classical music, who focuses on the raw, visceral affectivity of sound in performance. Her collaborative and solo work in theatre has toured nationally and internationally, and she is currently a London Sinfonietta Writing the Future composer.
www.aliciajaneturner.co.uk