Beyond the horizon of our woods is a gentle, light, moving and humorous piece on friendship, gender, age, memory, grief and the passage of time.
The performance takes its starting point from the friendship and lives of its performers: two friends, Keeley, a 21-year-old girl, and Michael, a 50-year-old man. In drawing on personal experiences of both, time lived together and time lived before knowing one another, as well as anticipating a future possibility of forgetting the other, the performance takes stock with much humour and grace of what is a friendship and a life.
The performance space consists of a suspended Hessian construction surrounded by hanging cardboard trees resembling a hut in the forest. The two performers are seen only from the waist down: their relationship unfolds to large degrees in the choreographies of the two bodies in the square area they inhabit, the movements of the hands, the positions of the feet, the handling of objects that appear and disappear.
Developed with Keeley McDonald and Michael Thorn as part of the MA Performance Works at Leeds Metropolitan University.