Islanders is a project developed and performed between 2018 and 2020 in collaboration with Nellie Saunby, Jamie Hammill and Giles Bailey. It explores the construction of island identity at a point when the UK’s relationship to other landmasses and the sea around it is in flux. By collectively expanding and re-staging historically diverse representations of islands that exist in the popular imagination, the performance offers a collage of material to propose critical relationships to states of isolation, political fantasy and the promise of rescue.

The performance builds a composite text from the fluid and dynamic resources of networked media. It weaves together references from cinema, literature, myth and anxious internet cultures. The flattening of hierarchies of these online archives allow Shakespeare’s indigenous island inhabitant Caliban to speak through a teenage gamer traversing the tropical islands of Far Cry 3. At other moments a generic castaway performs plaintive auto-tuned versions of the songs of Simon and Garfunkel, a drone records an anthropomorphic coconut walking over the desolate beaches of England’s North East coast and politicians, novelists and monsters speak simultaneously. 

Islanders aims to embody these wildly varying human experiences through choreographies, music, text and moving image to critique the alienating ideological positions that are shaping a hastily assembled British island identity. At the heart of the project has been a desire to let the material speak through the relationships in its various elements. Rather than offering an instructive or didactic position on the subject of the UK’s changing island identity, the work hopes to facilitate critical approaches from its audiences.

Through collaged fragments of video and live performance the work explores constructs of island identity at a pivotal point in the UK’s changing relationship to other landmasses. A strength of the piece is its seamless blending of disparate source material—including Shakespeare, video games and Boris Johnson’s Brexit speech—into a unique visual and performative vocabulary. As the festival coincides with ongoing stalemate over the Brexit deal, the political relevance of ‘Islanders’ is potent and echoed by a screening of Peter Greenaway’s film The Sea in Their Blood (1983), an irreverent analysis of our national relationship to the sea. Both underline that ‘autonomy’ is unsustainable. This message is in keeping with CIRCA’s operations in the Northeast. Though the region’s artist-led scene is extensive it is also economically precarious.

Katy Bentham on Islanders at Festival of the Not

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The years-long collective collaboration of Giles Bailey, Jamie Hammill, Nellie Saunby and Sophie Soobramanien and their work-in-progress, Islanders, is a project specifically commissioned by the festival in conjunction with other local arts organizations and supported financially in part with public funds from Arts Council England. Melding live performance with moving image, the project explores the psychic and physical identity of pieces of isolated land and the political ramifications of such isolation, specifically the landmass of the United Kingdom and its relationship to other geographies separated by bodies of water. Fluidly exploring content and format, it is a CIRCA Project, an entity that is interested in exploring the topography of the northeast of England. As someone who has dipped in and out of this region in the past couple of years, this work was so indelibly moving to me because of this kind of specificity, its artistic extrapolations through a group of locals who have lived, educated themselves, and continue to engage with their little chunk of the world. This marked the third iteration, the first two being live events such as this one that played at Berwick in 2016 and 2017 — a commitment to a continuum with much heft and purpose. Like many of the filmic pieces in the program that deal with creating bespoke spaces that consist of both fictional and “real” elements, Islanders rang metaphorically true in a spot that is a living breathing manifestation of an always-vulnerable fortified city that’s been standing since the 16th century, something that another festival commission explores through the work of artist and musician Luke Fowler called Enceindre.

Pamela Cohn on Islanders at Berwick Film and Media Festival