She Haunts this Place
What happens when a building becomes an object of representation for theatre, or story telling, for music or video? As a site that we have utilized for the creation of this performance, I think the Button Factory has evolved into two realities. The first is based on its substantial, matter-of-fact existence; the second has to do with our gaze. This view is puzzled by our desires and anxieties. Indeed, this second ‘reality’ is posited by our feelings and experiences of the place; although, it may seem like a pure illusion, it is capable of triggering a whole chain of consequences that materially affect our experience of the first. [S]he haunts this place is the dramatized result of our perception of how this place affects us.
This, of course, is a kind of haunting. In exploring the Button Factory and its history, our ensemble of artists have become mediums to experiences that are embedded in the building. While some of these experiences are set in the building’s actual history, often they are a part of a different truth that we feel this site must convey. I hope you will participate this evening as a witness to this haunting, and in so doing I trust that you may find yourself present in some fundamentally ethical way, to feel the weight of things and your own place in them, even if that place is simply, for the moment, as someone who has seen a ghost.
