[these roarers]

[these roarers] was a durational participatory event that drew together the participants’ bodily movement, the rhythm and fragility of speech with the rhythm and mutability of the coastal borderline of Whitstable. The starting point of the event was the words of the boatswain that open Shakespeare’s 'The Tempest': ‘When the sea is. Hence! What cares these roarers/ for the name of king?' For the boatswain 'these roarers' - the wind and waves of the storm - are indifferent to the status of the king and their breath and rhythm form a wordless, structureless roar. In the storm scenes in Shakespeare (both in The Tempest and King Lear) nature’s tempests are coupled with a crisis of stability – of both king and kingdom; the hierarchical social order is out of joint and these crises are witnessed through acts of human speech which are in turn dissipated and absorbed by the elements.

Insofar as the event was sited at the Whitstable shoreline, the nature of the shoreline’s ‘architecture’ was central to it. As an architecture the shoreline suggests an equivocal physical and symbolic formation. There is a paradox in an island mentality insofar as the coastline is a modulating and uncertain border undergoing both daily ebbs and flows and longer term coastal shifts and erosions. As a natural architectural border flux is part of the shore’s essence.

[these roarers] was part of the Whitstable Biennale and was open to the public to participate. Participants were invited to assemble in groups of threes and to read from a compilation of edited texts selected and organised by the artists. The texts were drawn from a range of sources from Piddington’s 'The Sailor’s Horn-Book for the Law of Storms' from 1848 to a range of literary texts dealing with the sea and its instabilities and terrors to related philosophical and political writings. Over the course of the day participants were asked to read out loud each in turn and passing the text within the group while simultaneously performing a set of simple choreographed rhythmic movements.

Speaking and bodily action are both a means of temporary and unstable inhabitation and in the performed event, movement, text, voice and site drew together the rhythm of reading with the rhythm of moving and interacted with the shoreline in a series of continual re-formations.

• https://www.whitstablebiennale.com/proje...
• Organisation