Performing the Eerie with Mary Steadman

There's a term that you use in your writing that I'm going to pronounce wrong, agential or agential

object,

agential object.

And that seems to be something really key to the way you try and draw out this presence or absence.

Yes.

through one of the visual themes that runs through a lot of this work are dresses or pieces of clothing that are not necessarily being worn by anything.

So can you tell us about that term and how that relates to maybe dwelling as a first shot, but we'll move on to another piece as well.

Yeah, yeah.

No, that to me was a wonderful finding.

And that came from a scenographer's work called Jocelyn McKinney, who did a lot of research into objects in performance from a scenographer's perspective.

I don't know that word.

What's a

scenographer? Somebody who works with

design, the visual design of performance.

And yeah, she was talking a lot about the agency of objects and the agential objects.

And I was really fascinated in my process about the materiality of things on stage, of objects on stage, and had read a lot about this through another scholar called Alice Rayner.

And she talks about the kind of doubling in theatre.

You've got the objects on stage are themselves, you know, they're dresses.

But they're also something else.

You know, they're always something else.

They're conveying another meaning.

That's what theatre does.

It has this kind of double quality to it.

And she talked about the idea that the material things on stage are ghostly.

They... ghosts can inhabit them and come through them, in and through them.