Q & A / Cwestiwn ac Ateb: Clerke & Joy

We caught up with Clerke & Joy to find out more about ‘part performance, part lecture and part school science experiment’, Volcano. The show comes to the Weston Studio on 4 April.

Aethon ni am sgwrs gyda Clerke a Joy er mwyn darganfod mwy am ‘y perfformiad, darlith ac arbrawf gwyddonol’ y cynhyrchiad, Volcano. Bydd y sioe yma yn ein Stiwdio Weston ar 4 Ebrill.

What’s your inspiration behind the show?
This is a nice story. Volcano comes from a few different points, which were somehow combined over a pizza called ‘Etna’ at a London Pizza Express sometime in December 2011, and made sense of in many rehearsals between then and May 2013 when we premiered the show at Brighton Festival.

1. Rachael is notoriously difficult to buy presents for. When her family visited Iceland they didn’t know what to get her, so brought back some ash scooped up from the base of Eyjafjallajokull. It’s the show’s magic ingredient.

2. Around the same time Jojo sat opposite a man on the train to Hither Green. He was wearing a suit and listening to music on his headphones, and crying. His music was turned up loud - he was listening to Jennifer Hudson’s And I’m Telling You, which is a really epic love ballad. He became our pilot.

3. There is a really great book by the Glasgow based artist Ilana Halperin, called Physical Geology, which is about the relationship between human time and geological time, and also about geological processes that happen within the body, like the forming of kidney or gall stones. This was our inspiration and excuse to use humans & volcanoes as parallels, with equal importance. It’s also where the show’s original title - A Volcano Perpetually Erases Its Own History - comes from.

The show is described as ‘part performance, part lecture, part science experiment’. What can we expect to discover from watching the show?
Well, we hope that different audience members will have different experiences. The show has a lot of contrasting elements within it, so we tend to find that some people come out understanding how volcanoes work for the first time since primary school, whereas others will be moved by the story of the pilot, or excited by the visual effects created on stage (we’re constantly amazed by how much you can do with talcum powder and a desk fan.)

You’ve been described as ‘bending all the rules’, can you give us a taster of how you do this in Volcano?
That’s a hard question. We’re never totally sure what the rules are, so you can only ever be about 50% sure you are bending them. We studied together at Dartington College of Arts (before and during it’s merger with Falmouth University) - an institution that is pretty renowned for doing away with a lot of rules altogether. We like to think that gave us a very open attitude to what we can and can’t do in our work.

In Volcano we worked with Dr Mike Cassidy, who is a volcanologist, and have an actual volcanology lecture in the show. We also work with Adrian Spring, (who plays the pilot) and have him standing on stage almost totally still for the whole show. It works because he’s an amazing performer - you’d never expect anyone to be so engaging whilst doing nothing, and we think it really makes the show. That’s probably the bravest thing we’ve done. There must be a rule against having someone doing nothing on stage for so long! It feels like something very much borrowed from the live art world, that we don’t see so much of in theatre.

Where do the Righteous Brothers fit in?
They are the eruption… you’ll have to come and see.

What do you want audiences take away from the show?
A connection with the pilot. The karaoke version of Unchained Melody stuck in their heads. The smell of talcum powder and vinegar. An understanding of volcanoes. A lump in their throat.

Describe Volcano in three words.
Tragicomic, naive and… oh go on, explosive.

Catch Clerke & Joy: Volcano in the Weston Studio on Friday 4 April, 8pm. Click here for full details and to book.

Dewch draw i fwynhau cynhyrchiad Clerke & Joy: Volcano yn ein Stiwdio Weston ar nos Wener 4 Ebrill, 8pm. Cliciwch yma am ragor o fanylion ac i archebu eich tocynnau.