The phrase “bell, book, and candle” refers to a method of excommunication imposed on someone who has committed a grievous sin.

For Ian this performance was a banishing of disease, addiction, and madness. For Rebecca it was an expression of grief, diminishing fertility, and longing for a child. The audience witnessed two parallel crises, and a ritual executed, as prayers often in extremis.

Rebecca sat on a charred chair at a charred table and poured the sands of time on her face from a shattered hourglass. Ian had a bible roped to his face in “blind faith” and the works of Poe roped to his backside. Drinking, making an ass of himself, and making others complicit, he staggered about at points in heels, or with crumbling bricks roped to his feet, with a library of books tied to his genitals, while glugging from a ship in a bottle. Rebecca sat under a sheet and fingered the strings of pearls about her neck. She sporadically cut them with scissors and blindly attempted to catch her spilling beads and to throw them one by one into a chamber pot positioned in front of her. She intermittently swigged from a wine bottle through the sheet. Over time the sheet was streaked red and her pearls were lost.

Ian eventually peeled the sheet away and Rebecca emerged, as yet unprepared to accept defeat. Ian, exhausted from flogging himself with roses, sat at the table eating while Rebecca initiated a ritual, smudging anyone who wanted it before progressing. With the mutual offering of a blown egg, a spell written on a ribbon, salvaged pearls, and a magpie wing nest placed in the charred baby chair, together they raised energy and set their intent. They bound the chair to their arms with the ribbon and exited together.

We make psychologically, emotionally, physically, and spiritually intense durational performances which function as personal rituals of transition or transformation. The work involves installations, soundscapes, choreographies of actions, participation, and improvisation. Our experiences are aestheticised as part of a revelatory ongoing narrative. We are two performers with different but interwoven processes and languages. We perform together as a way to make sense of our lives.