If DAG’s mascots displaced the rhythms of the small town, surfacing not only its labour history, Ann Whitehurst’ Training to be Me did the opposite, settling into its history, recalling its cultural memory and challenging public perceptions surrounding labour and capitalism in its homogenization of difference. Starting from a video installation in which we observe a deconstructed ritual of Whitehurst in and out of a wheelchair lift, encountering a fragmented upstairs of a bare Victorian room, the performance grew out into the Priory Hall space; Whitehurst elegantly dressed, sat in her wheelchair, coins surrounding the wheels. Her stillness candid and dangerous, echoing through the quasi-religious space, recalling a foreign ritual; by her side, three screens displaying a digital portrait- she is still, emotionless. In its repetition, the ritual of going up and down the life, of embodying that particular physicality and journey, begins to formulate character. Yet Whitehurst doesn’t allow this stillness to settle, instead carries the journey through a series of marked points at chosen locations throughout the town that relate to this perception of difference; every time, she remains still in that particular spot, embodying it, recalling its history, and leaving a trail of coins in her place- a visual metaphor for the profit capitalism makes from disabled people, a profit that never comes back to the source. Priory Hall becomes a symbol for the church, an active participant in the development of such social prejudice. The installation finishes at Ashfield Hall, a former workhouse for beggars with an ambiguous history.
Ann Whitehurst training to be herself
From Simon McEwan’s narrative three dimensional projections that framed and brought to life the history of the Much Wenlock Church in the cold, deep and dark night, to Tanya Raabe’s live portrait exploring, amongst dialogues with the Mayor, the life of a Claude De Tomus, a character stemming from her encounter with a recently disabled inhabitant of the town, M21 traveled its social politics with both humour and sharpness, disengaging common participatory modes to intervene directly into the life and rhythms of this rural town, challenging perceptions surrounding disability live art, but also the communal aspects of sports, creating discourses around difference. As DASH’s own Mike Layward, in his hay suit, reading out from Gerard Winstanley’s 1649 Diggers movement as he wandered from the Priory Hall to the fields in which this small town echoes and disappears, there was a sense of both celebration and subversion underlining the two days, one now murmuring in the local cultural memory.
