EAZ: Zoe Katsilerou and Eilon Morris with Andrew Morrish

A layered composition of projections and superimposed improvisations.

Zoe, Eilon and Andrew are ghostly figures standing beside each other. Is it the impossibility of them physically sharing a space that makes their apparent closeness more poignant? Eilon looks at something we can’t see. They’re in a place ‘just before things happen.’

Eilon: There’s a vulnerability in being in one space for a really long time. I’ve come back to quite simple things: what is it to listen to the wind, or the sounds of the street, and how does that inspire the creative process?

When teaching improvisation, it’s first about getting people to feel ok with themselves in the moment, to notice that critical thinking and judgement, and finding strategies for putting those aside. With that permission, you can see what’s actually happening rather than what you think should be happening or what you expected to or wished had happened.

Zoe: At the start of an improvisation, it feels like I’m standing on a trapdoor. When the improvisation begins it opens and I fall into darkness. Everything disappears and there’s just this moment: there is no time, the improvisation is not long or short.

I miss being in a room with people very much. I miss that sense of bouncing off each other and playing with the unknown. At the moment, the unknown feels overwhelming and outside of us, whereas in an improvisation I dive into it. And this is why improvisation can be a great tool. It asks us to courageously be in and interact with the present moment: what does this moment ask of all of us?

Andrew: With digital technology, people are looking within paradigms that already exist for how you’re supposed to use this technology, and that mainly comes from appalling marketing people, politicians, or television executives who are interested in persuasion. There’s no reason to try replicate the ‘live performance’ thing, but there is a reason to explore this technology in a way where you find the experience satisfying, and you need to take time to let that happen.

I’m committed to the idea that improvisers are set up for a world where people can’t travel. When the world has to change, when instead of having these huge cities filled up with apartment buildings and they start knocking them down, we’ll go back to villages. As an improviser, I can do a new show every day. People can come and they’ll give me carrots and chickens.

With the fires in Australia, the environmentalists were saying the loggers were wrong, and the loggers were saying the environmentalists were wrong. They were all using the fires as a weapon, and I was hoping that the scale of the disaster would make us say: we’re all wrong. We all have to find a new way.

Link to Róisín O'Brien's website