ICA Announce Collaboration With There We Will Be Buried

The beginning of a new partnership, LIFT and the ICA was announced today with the collaboration producing  the performance ‘There we will be buried’, a unique play written and produced by Yair Oelbaum. With a cast including the renowned German artist Kai Althoff, this theatrical production is framed within the LIFT Festival as a visual arts response to the performing arts.

With the ICA serving as a hub for visiting artists and festival-goers for the duration of the festival, both the ICA and LIFT – who share the same premises on The Mall – use this opportunity to bring a lens to bear on the convergence between contemporary art practice and theatrical performance.
Oelbaum and Althoff play the two main characters, Orpah and Lydia – single mothers searching for a lost daughter. Oelbaum outlines the story as follows: ‘Orpah and Lydia are infantile paupers, whose spirits are sustained only through prayer – the only activity that they are truly capable of performing. They swoon endlessly, and are fractured into several simultaneous accounts of the same event. Like any eager child would, they stray from these scripts in their lust for true voices and sweets. Everything that crosses Orpah and Lydia’s path remains with them for all time; nothing is lost, nothing is left, nothing is re-covered.’

The characters in There we will be buried are fractured and represented not only through the physical bodies of each actor on stage, but also by pre-recorded audio and video tapes of prior, slightly differing performances. There we will be buried presents a broken narrative, incapable of telling a single authoritative concrete story. Instead its interpretation relies on the degree to which these fractured elements are read as composite or dissonant. With additional cast members Yedidya Oelbaum, Jessica Polaniecki, Daniel Cowen and Alex Beth, each character is defined by the collision of the players’ true selves and their real life personas.
There we will be buried was commissioned by Focal Point Gallery and subsequently toured as part of the 2012 Whitney Biennial. LIFT and the ICA wish to thank Andrew Hunt and Saim Demircan at Focal Point Gallery, as well as our supporters who have helped make the London premiere possible.

21 June 2012 – 24 June 2012 £12 / £10 concessions / £8 ICA Members / £5 ICA Student Members

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