Horses, Horses, Coming In In All Directions
January 2000
Arches Theatre Glasgow
Patti Smith, Horses
" And Johnny’s lying the in his sperm coffin And an angel looks down on him and says Oh, pretty boy, can’t you show nothing but surrender?."
Created as a ‘site-sympathetic’ piece for the cavernous spaces of the Arches in Glasgow, the show was created with the performers Cora Bissett, Itxaso Moreno and Harry Ward, with percussion by Guy Nicolson and electric bass by Roger Ward.
The show took as its starting point a celebration of the ‘joyous mess’ of human relationships, inspired in particular by Patti Smith’s famous track ‘Horses’. Woven from various texts including Alina Reyes’ The Butcher, Angela Carter’s story The Kiss and Italo Calvino’s folktale The Apple Girl, the piece was framed by the antics of a Basque clown, played by Itxaso Moreno, through a library where readers become aroused by erotic texts, to a lecherous butcher’s shop, to a night-time scene of storytelling where the audience snuggle up under a giant eiderdown with the cast, to a suicide jump where a man and a women fall in love on their way to impact with the ground, to a water-drenched primal celebration of lust, a wild dance duet backed by a six-piece band.