A Scene with human furniture

Play fetch with my 'I.'

performance

A Scene with human furniture stages a dialogue between a printed page and an audio-recorded voice; an experiment across asynchronous media. Audience members are instructed to read silently, as they listen to the recording. A BDSM doggy scene maps PAGE, VOICE and BODY to ‘I’, ‘you’ and ‘we’.

VOICE is sometimes non verbal (whining, panting), affective (laughing, shouting) and disobedient. VOICE veers off script. The complex gestures of the audience (reading, listening, holding PAGE, remaining silent and seated, shifting uneasily) enact the narrative: the ‘I’ of PAGE and ‘you’ of VOICE come together to the ‘we’ of BODY i.e. the audience.

‘We’ (the audience) are instruments for the script and active performers; human furniture, sheet holders. PAGE and VOICE synchronise and instruct the audience to ‘stand up!’ There are performers planted in the audience who 'obey': stand up, kneel down and place their left cheeks on the floor. Human furniture ends with arses in the air.

A Scene with human furniture was commissioned by artist Chris Timms with PEER and ACME for the listening event Stucco Echoes Mouth: A Trembling of the Frame London, 18 October 2018. The work was also included in the conference Gestures: Writing That Moves Between at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, 15 and 16 February 2019.

Artists, Rowland Hill and Dyveke Bredsdorff invited me to adapt A Scene with human furniture to make it accessible to deaf audiences for their event Soundings: a performative listening event, 15 August 2019 at Raven Row. For this version the audio recorded ‘VOICE’ is accompanied by timed video audio captions.

Most recently, I was invited to re-stage A Scene with human furniture at Grand Union, Birmingham as part of the event Where Does the Sex Go? about gentrification and intimcacies, 4 April 2025.