ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
Louise White is an award winning theatre-maker who has presented innovative audience experiences since 2009. She makes work for theatres and offsite venues: these have included black boxes, abandoned commercial units, psychiatric institutions and a decrepit Georgian mansion.
She has developed projects with dancers, culinary artists, composers, visual artists, opera singers, and children. She aims to cultivate original collective experiences that leave the audience with difficult questions about accountability and the fragility of the human condition.
Her recent works include This is the Funeral of Your Life (2017-18); A play about death through the challenges of living and Mother You (2015); an ambitious large scale performance for a disused commercial building.
Visit Louise White's website @ www.louisewhiteperformance.com
PRODUCTIONS
This is the Funeral of Your Life
This is the Funeral of Your Life is a play about death through the challenges of living
Leave behind the emails, the bills, the deadlines. The quest for recognition, fame and glory.
We are here. Together. Now.
Watch us facilitate your funeral in real time, in this live event featuring an actor, a dancer and a mezzo soprano.
Find out who you really are.
No really…You.
Right in front of you.
Like never before.
I mean we’re all dying anyway.
Mother You
Mother You is an ambitious large scale performance for a disused commercial building which fuses performance, installation and video art to create a tender theatrical moment of activism and communion.
This work was developed with The Abbeyleix Bog Project, a small community in Laois who reclaimed a vast area of bogland from a semi-state body for their own recreational use. You get more information on their activities and on Abbeyleix Bog here.
Set in a disused warehouse and fusing live performance, installation, video art and ritual, the audience are invited to be guests of this strained community; to collectively witness action and to piece together fragments as the work unfolds.
Way Back Home
We have to find the way. To tell this. Our story. Together. For tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. All of this has happened but it’s not who we are. All of this has happened and it’s just not us. So we have to do it. For a nation. For our heart and your heart and the heart of it all. For the children, for the flowers, for the buildings. This is an exciting collaboration between Louise White and painter Clare Henderson; where a dancer, 3 actors and a child imagine the way back from all this sadness.
Supported by the Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon, Project Arts Centre, developed at FRINGE LAB with the support of Dublin Fringe Festival.
All Things Considered It's a Nice Place to Start
Myself and two other artists wrote thank-you letters to people that we didn’t know; a letter a day for one week to each of the 32 counties as well as 25 personal letters to friends and family members. We thanked individuals for small acts like holding the bus when we were running late, smiling hello when they passed on the street, for persevering and for being part of their communities. We explored the idea of engaging proactively and positively with strangers; what this meant and the complexities that arose from such a simple act. I developed and directed the performance for a theatre space based on our process and the reactions that we experienced.
Last month 300 strangers throughout the 32 counties received thank you cards from us. We wanted to reach out so we wrote to them. Because things were grim we were sad and we didn't know what to do. We wanted to say thanks for letting us skip the queue that time, for being bright and different and needed and involved and for daring to be you. Writing these notes gave us hope and a reason to look up; made us think of fresh starts, new beginnings and a time for change. Now we are making a play about it and we want to share it with you. We want to change the world but we are only three. This could be a nice place to start.
From the Heart
The audience were taken on a journey through performance and installation in a decrepit Georgian mansion; they were given small ‘performance gifts’ during the piece; these included stolen moments with individual performers sharing secrets, imparting small tokens or rubbing their palms with lavender balm. The performance ended with the audience gathered together in a room with a large dining table set with cups of tea, bread and jam for them to eat and drink together.
In devastation there is beauty. In all that is faded and worn something new must bloom. This place is rare. It tells our story, it echoes those that have gone before. Look around you. There are whispers of histories, adventures unfolding and secrets being shared. Experience our search for redemption in this crumbling Georgian mansion. Pain brought us here but now we’re finding the way out. Come along, our arms are open. What lies around the corner can only make us better.
Nurse Me
Here we made a site-responsive piece in four adjoining rooms in a disused part of the hospital’s annexe building. The work explored ideas of atonement and confession by the performers purging themselves of personal stories and possible case histories. The audience also spent time alone in an evocative incense filled confessional room, where they experienced four different types of reflective stations.
