Today, we focussed on the final site-specific design work for Between Two Tides, which centres on creating two cairns and crafting objects for the performers to manipulate during key moments. The design team have conceived the cairns as sculptural installations built directly from the land, using both indigenous and ‘erratic’ rocks. We arranged these rocks in concentric, curling lines, with each circle composed of five distinct rock types: Green Jasper, Red Jasper, Rhomb Porphyry, Grey Granite, and the native Cretaceous Chalk. we want these rocks to become objects of human interaction, moved and handled by both performers and audience members. In doing this, we want to highlight the intimate connection between human activity and the landscape, and explore how our actions continue to shape and reshape this fragile environment.
The most extended moment of interaction with the cairns will occur during a section of the performance titled Gravel. This part of the performance draws its choreography from my poem of the same name, with choreographers and performers crafting movement that echoes the poem’s narrative of geological history, glacial processes, and the destructive impact of human exploitation on the South Holderness coast (a subject covered in depth by local historian Phil Mathison). Performers and audience members will move the stones, tracing their histories and geological origins through physical gesture, embodying the slow, grinding work of glaciers and coastal tides that brought these erratic rocks from faraway places—Scotland, Scandinavia, and English mountain ranges—to rest on this shore.
Gravel will also tell through its movement and choreography the lesser-known story of how human greed altered the natural defences of Spurn Point. In the nineteenth century, local cadgers—boat-based haulers—removed vast quantities of stone, shingle, and cobbles from the coast. Ship after ship left the shore, heavy with the ancient stones that once helped protect the coastline from erosion. In doing this, they stripped away the peninsula’s natural armour, leaving it vulnerable to the relentless forces of the North Sea.
As my poem Gravel recounts:
. . . Until today, long gone,
With any profits made too quickly spent,
That prehistoric fossil ore
Can do no more to help the land
Because an absent rock
Can not in any measure stop
The ever-hungry sea.
These acts of human intervention, carried out for quick financial gain, permanently altered the landscape – making it significantly more vulnerable. The cairns we will build on site will accordingly become a poignant reminder of this history—a way to reflect on the interconnectedness of human and natural forces, and how our human actions leave lasting marks on the environment. In Between Two Tides, stones will be more than props; they will be the the keepers of deep time, telling a story of geological and human history in every gesture.
