I co-created and performed in Marathon as part of JAMS. In the piece, four people, under a kind of collective amnesia, are trying to remember a play they once staged together. Marathon was made as a response to the unpredictable, tumultuous political events of 2016 from a place of confusion, anxiety and paralysis. Through an artistic process led by Alan Fielden, we explored group hysteria, disagreement and repair. Marathon won the Oxford Samuel Beckett Price 2018 and was performed from 20-29th September 2018 as part of the Barbican's Theatre and Dance season.

Here is an extract from Diana Damian's response to a work-in-progress of Marathon: 

"Four bodies on stage are attempting to reconstruct an event; the event is a story about a messenger, a witness, a king, and an indefinite ‘people’ that weave in and out. Four bodies on stage are waiting. Four bodies on stage are enacting an event that is both unfolding in front of us, and precedes us. The event is plural: it is neither contained by the recurring narrative moments (the messenger moves us through it all), nor by the repetitions, the narrative units that blur one thing into another. This is a rehearsal, this is an event, this is a play within a performance. It is also none of those things. It is a kind of atmosphere of crisis that plays out in intimate domesticities – personal to political, actual and manufactured. It is variants of familiarity that shape intimate anxieties, it is crises on a planetary scale. A poetics of anticipation that collapses into theatre, and theatre that constantly collapses onto itself. Like Forced Entertainment put through a shredder, or a Bausch choreography in the form of a script."

Credits

Lead artist and performer: Alan Fielden
Co-creator and performer: Sophie Grodin, Malachy Orozco and Jemima Yong
Barbican premiere produced by: Natalie Raaum
Mentors: Karen Christopher, Jonathan Burrows, Sarah Wilson-White and Jane Greenfield

Links

• Full video documentation 

• JAMS discuss the making of Marathon on Barbican's blog
• An article I wrote as a reflection on the piece: "Mixed Feelings - Laughter and Violence"
• Written response by writer Diana Damian
• Review of Marathon by A Younger Stage