A performance installation that takes place over six hours from mid-afternoon to dusk involving sound, scissors and helium balloons performed by twenty women and eighty flowery dresses.
The women sing songs remembered from their childhood whilst painstakingly cutting flowers from the dresses. As the flowers drop to the floor, the dresses float tentatively above the ground until, eventually, they rise in ghostly parades to the ceiling. At the end of the performance, the ceiling is crowded with colourful remnants and the floor is strewn with flowers.
The women’s voices, accompanied by a giant weather balloon harmonica, rise and fall in meditative song, their voices mingling to create a sense of other worldliness.
Long Time Passing was originally commissioned by Shoreditch Festival and performed at Shoreditch Church as Bells of Shoreditch. It was subsequently re-made as MASS in a disused Ba’thist prison compound in Kurdistan-Iraq and has since toured, made anew in each location, as Long Time Passing.
