Unattended Luggage

With "Unattended Luggage" we develop our next piece within a series of dynamical narrative systems, which is simultaneously a stage set as a collection of props and a story telling machine.

Four generations of family, crossing the Atlantic and the world, desiring the distant, abandoning what is close, following instincts and escaping dangers. Rolled up together, a collection of detritus and heirlooms, love letters and returned post in a case that holds their history, their desires and perhaps a bit of their future.

Unattended Luggage appears to be simply an antique piece of luggage, not out of place on an Atlantic steamship liner from the early 20th century. The drawers of the luggage, a mobile dressing room, contain elements of each character. Moving images, audio traces, photographs, perfumed letters and the well organised items of daily use are arranged to outline the story of this family. The audience is invited to open drawers, read letters, watch the newsreel and fall into the sound collage that accompanied the first generation as they headed for the bright lights and academic future of New York.

Each drawer, that previously might have held spare socks or a shaving kit, contains the relics that tell a chapter of the story. The first drawer contains an unread letter that was written to her parents, the returned letter that says they have been moved on, the forms filled out at Ellis Island and other parts that help the audience to put together that chapter of the story. The case and the relics begin to form a mobile family shrine filled with the venerated relicts of generations past and present.