Climbing to the End

This performance depicts the collection and loss of memories throughout a person’s life. The collections of memories is depicted through the picking up of meaningful objects, and the journey of one’s life is shown through the repetitive action of climbing up stairs. Death is inevitably reached at the top of the staircase, and the memories are lost to the sands of time.

The filming of the performance was done completely in one continuous shot, and it was the first and only shot we took, because in real life you only get one shot and you can’t redo mistakes. The fact that we only took one shot made the performance extremely improvisational. We subsequently had a camera malfunction; the gimbal we used to stabilise the camera malfunctioned and flipped the camera over briefly. When looking over the footage, I realised that this actually could represent the difficult, unexpected moments and mistakes of life. The performance took place in OCADu’s Yellow Staircase, an area in the school where students are free to write and draw whatever they want on the walls. I used this place as the setting for the performance because the discordant messages and images on the wall reflect the thoughts in one’s mind.