Two chairs are placed on the small rough dirt road. Fields stretch out away from us at either end. We walk together along the road arriving at these chairs; we lay a white sheet on the ground between the chairs. We sit silently with questions before us, each question acting as an invitation, for us and our viewers to participate. Evocative questions with no clear answers:

Is it the house, the closed doors, the logic of windows that define us?

All those corners and straight lines, are they flaming?

Or are our forms maps across which move arrows and dotted lines?

Do we rise from our chairs pulling against gravity?

Clumsiness and fright, are they inevitable?

Do we deny the ground we stand on?

Sitting in the chairs, we open up the space for reflection, for listening, for walking.

“Listening: On the Architecture of Aging” is an investigation as performance, an inquiry and reflection with audience. Our interest has been over the past few years in the creative use, and transgressive potential of, non-institutional spaces, the spaces in between and outside of the conventional settings where women’s bodies leak out of the cracks, walk on, and make a mark, the scuff of a foot, the shift of gravel. We, as women, exist as a presence; perhaps intangible and ill-defined but certainly energetic, active, and persistent in culture and in society. This performance explores not only presence but absence. How can we define, and engage with, the limitations and potentials of physical, temporal and theoretical space? Our strategies are designed to activate vectors as bodies, limited by disability and age, contained by/in cultural and historical structures.

Do we find each other in all this?

Does the path we walk on lock around our feet?

Does the road become a river with only one destination?