Ghost Garden
Concept and Direction: Yolande Snaith
Choreography: Yolande Snaith in collaboration with the dancers
Visual artist: Sharon Marston
Writer: Adele Edling Shank
Theatre designers: Miranda Melville, Steven Kemp
Costume design: Miranda Melville and Yolande Snaith
Lighting designer: Sooyeon Hong
Composers: Jean-Jacques Palix, David Coulter and Bach
Dancers:Alison Deiterle-Smith, raffaella Judd, Erica Nordin, Sadie
Weinberg, John Diaz, Robby Johnson
Stege Manager: Anjee Nero
Marketing and press: Sharon Hancock
“What is a garden? A place /a space / a vision / a dream / a wish / an idea / a longing / a secret / a sanctuary / a journey / an exploration / an excavation / a memory/ a dedication / a fear / a fantasy /a love / a loss / a home / a resting place? Are there perhaps as many gardens as there are living beings?”
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PRESS
“ A woman curls up as if dreaming . . . the dreamer might be the audience entering Snaith’s visually rich sensibility.”
Janice Steinberg Diego Union Tribune
“Cinematic choreography.All theatrical elements contributing to a fully realized creation. A stage continually filled with stimulating activity, not necessarily spread across the stage but occurring at discrete corners and places of visual power. Ghost Garden is dance theatre of the highest order.”
David Lemburg, Artscapemedia.com
Ghost Garden was an adaptation and development of the Jardin Blanc
created by Yolande Snaith Theatredance, UK, 2004.
Artistic director Yolande Snaith, Visual Artist Sharon Marston and theatre
designers Miranda Melville and Steven kemp, have collaborated on the
design concept for Ghost Garden in a way that at times blurs the
definitions between two artistic disciplines. Sharon’s sculptural forms
have been integrated into both the spatial organization and structure of
the set and the costume designs, whilst the theatre designers’ theatrical
vision has created a world within which to animate these forms.
The initial inspiration for Ghost Garden came from a visit to the late
Derek Jarman’s garden set in the bleak landscape of Dungeness, with a
backdrop of a nuclear power station beside the English Channel. This site
put into question, for me, the very idea of a garden: “The gardener digs
in another time, without past or future, beginning or end. A time that
does not cleave the day with rush hours, lunch breaks, the last bus home.
As you walk into the garden you pass into another time – the moment of
entering can never be remembered. Around you the landscape lies
transfigured. Here is the Amen beyond the prayer.” Derek Jarman ‘Modern
Nature’.
Ghost Garden evolved out of two years of research into Gardens, the
multitude of forms that gardens take and our associations with them. Our
explorations of the garden have taken us through many landscapes;
historical gardens, contemporary, formal, public, private, secret, and
forgotten; crowded city gardens, lush green country gardens of England,
cactus gardens in the Californian desert, as well as photographic records,
paintings, writings, personal memories and associations. Out of this
research we began to think of the stage as an empty field within which to
create a garden of movement, light, forms, sound, music and text. This
piece is the result of our many excavations, plots and journeys within
that field of ideas.
Ghost Garden was created with a UCSD Arts and Humanities Award
