Glen Neath is a writer, artist and theatre-maker. Collaborations include Ring with David Rosenberg (BAC, Edinburgh and UK tours), Hide with Lizzie Clachan at the Royal Festival Hall and Hannah Ringham’s Free Show (bring money) with Hannah Ringham, which premiered at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2011 before transferring to the Soho Theatre. Romcom and Hello for Dummies, both with Ant Hampton, have been produced in sixteen countries to date. Other plays include End of the Round, The Superheroes and Closer to Ormsby, and an adaptation of Max Frisch’s novel, Gatenbein, staged in Berlin and Zurich. Plays for Radio 4 include Listen Up (2009), Six Impossible Things (2010), Occupied, written with John Jordan (2012) and The Long Count (2012). Sound installations include The Breach, exhibited at Manifesta7 (the European Biennial of Contemporary Art) and Body considering its pains, exhibited at Shunt, the ICA and the First Fortnight Festival in Dublin. He has published two novels, The Outgoing Man and The Fat Plan. @GlenNeath | glenneath.co.uk
Fiction is the second collaborative project I have worked on with director David Rosenberg. Like Ring, the first, it employs binaural sound technology and takes place predominately in the pitch dark. Using things we learnt from our first project together, I plan to write a script that further examines the audience member’s sense of self and of what he/she believes to be real. In preparation for my residency I have undertaken preliminary research on the way we, as humans, assimilate fiction, attributing emotions and desires and intent to flimsy constructions we call ‘characters’. I am interested in this in discussion and in practise; so I hope to convey this concept successfully to the group, probably via an opening address by the only real performers in the room, while at the same time seducing them, the audience, into a fictional dreamscape that we will be creating in the dark around them. Patrick Colm Hogan, in his book, ‘Cognitive Science’, says:‘To know that something is fictional is to make a judgement that it does not exist. But existence judgements are cortical. They have relatively little to do with our emotional responses to anything. The intensity of emotional response is affected by a number of variables… [which] include, for example, proximity and speed, vividness, expectedness and so on.’