London Word Festival: Keep Breathing & Like You Were Before – review

Chris Goode's Keep Breathing explores at what be found, shared and said in one breath. Photograph: Alex Newman

A double header of theatrical intimacy at the equally intimate (though draughty) Stoke Newington International Airport brought together shows from Debbie Pearson and Chris Goode.

Pearson’s Like You Were Before re-visits and re-occupies video footage of her final day in Toronto nearly six years ago, which she spent with friends, family and the particularities of an unforgotten life. Narrating and layering her performance over the audio track of her voice from behind the camera, she traces the movements and half-remembered insignia of a time, place and emotional language she no longer speaks.

To the right of the stage, footage is shown of a backwards gaze on a train journey, a looping reminder of how memory itself is a director’s cut of what you want to recall. At times, some of the observations dip into the twee, but the effect of over-dubbing her own voice was an occasionally haunting choice by Pearson, matched by the boldness  of her desire to expose her own life to such personal examination.

Chris Goode, who performed at STK last month, sketched out the first draft of an evolving, audience participatory, hour-long rumination on breath, an attempt “to know what can be done by spending a breath together.” In an almost Dave Gorman-esque fashion, Goode has begun a chainmail to find words and thoughts that can be said in one brief, vital exhalation.

Some have responded with Clinton Card-like epigrams; others, with such an open brief to express, answer with real poignancy and autobiography. Although this piece is unfinished, it has clearly already taken Goode on a personal journey, as he explores how his mother’s degenerative respiratory illness has affected his relationship with breath and breathing in all his work as a writer and actor. To Goode, language and theatre’s existence is coterminous with breathing, or for the poet Charles Olson: “The head, by way of the ear, to the syllable, the heart, by way of the breath, to the line.” Sound words indeed.

The London Word Festival hosts events in and around Hackney until 5 May. More details at London Word Festival.