The idea is this:: a diptych on a split stage. The left half is live performance. Two actors. You and I. Obviously in love. Dressed only in basic underwear and a perforated gauze garment draped over our entire bodies. Like a translucent ghost sheet. We are engaged in a self conducted marriage ceremony. I have Parkinson’s Disease and thus limited mobility. You are my beautiful Japanese yoga teacher who has rescued me from my plight and made my life worth living again. We hug and we kiss during a gyrating marriage dance which we choreographed ourselves. Based on the barn dance. Left hand clasping right. Fairly easy to execute. With a caller on soundtrack, there to remind us to stick to the script. We are inside a giant empty tea cup. Orange ceramic. Busy living our new life when a sudden rush of boiling hot Malvern Spa water is poured in on top of us. It disrupts the rituals of our daily lives that have been patiently built up together. Drenched, scalded and steaming a muddy brown, we step out of the tea cup together and bow to the sixty carefully selected members of the audience who had to apply in their thousands to be at the event. The sixty were chosen in a supposed random lottery draw. Not told that they were now to be known throughout history as the chosen ones.
The right half of the diptych is a digital cinema screen that has been playing simultaneously during the acting out of our marriage ceremony. It depicts the moving chaos of our bodies swirling and decomposing in the torrent of boiling hot Malvern Spa water. Still inside the giant orange ceramic tea cup. The gauze shifts are gradually disintegrating and tissuey fragments are spinning of in the swirl. Our underwear is becoming displaced and sharp amongst the image of our spinning bodies being returned to their beginnings is the image of dark, prickly tea leaves clumping together as symbols of the last vestiges of extinguishing life. It is said that when all is finally returned to the sediment and the soil that it is the DNA bound and intact in the clumping tea leaves that will initiate the resurrection. This parable appears in sub titles written on the digital screen whilst the two actors – You and I – stand bowed and frozen. Stage left.
.
© Gary Boswell 2026
.