Hard Pressed - CANVAS.

We are so excited to be launching our new project - Canvas! We’re kicking off with two monologues inspired by the Christina Quarles painting, Hard Pressed.

Christina is an LA-based artist who uses her abstract, colourful style to explore sexual and racial identities, gender, queerness and bodies. Her work - much like the aims of Crosslight - plays with location and space, squashing intersecting planes of images against each other to “emphasise dislocation over location”. The subjects’ limbs are cramped, pressed up against the picture frame; the painting’s literal confinement becomes a figurative confinement within its world. Her creations feel both otherworldly and familiar, combining the alien with the raw and human.

We were attracted to Christina’s Hard Pressed in particular for this project due to this latter contradiction. The mood is easy to interpret, yet abstract enough that we felt anybody could take away their own story from it. To write pieces inspired by this painting, we chose Simon Marshall - whose lyrical down-to-earthness we felt perfectly encapsulated the tone of the work - and Rosa Day Jones, whose writing you can always count on to capture the gentleness and humanity beneath something seemingly chaotic. We’re so excited that both writers delivered completely on their respective front.

We also asked Crosslight's Musical Director Beth King to come on board and write an original piece of music inspired by the painting, similarly to Rosa and Simon, which we put over the credits of each video. Beth's gorgeous composition perfectly encapsulates the sombre and unwordly tone of the painting, and perfectly encapsulates both the optimism at the end of Rosa's script, as well as the lingering darkness that closes Simon's.

With that being said, please enjoy Rosa and Simon’s responses to Hard Pressed!

Brownbird was written by Rosa Day Jones and performed by Ellen Victoria. Also featuring original music by Beth King.

Non-Verbal Communication was written by Simon Marshall and performed by Marina Johnson. Also featuring original music by Beth King.

Each monologue was performed by Ellen and Marina without seeing the painting the script was inspired by or knowing who wrote their piece. Rosa and Simon - without speaking to each other - both pulled similar themes from the painting: power imbalances in relationships, and specifically queer relationships in both scripts. While Daisy in Brownbird is overpowered by the ghost of a past relationship, Non-Verbal Communication’s Rosie makes herself smaller in order to accommodate her manipulative partner's somewhat toxic presence. The fact that both writers gleaned similar themes from the painting, yet explored it in totally different ways with their own unique voices, was something we really wanted to explore with Canvas; the idea that art is universal enough to evoke the same tone or sentiment to each viewer, but each person will interpret that meaning within their own framing.

We hope you enjoyed this first edition of Canvas! Please let us know your thoughts at @CrosslightTCo!

Announcement: Canvas.

Canvas is Crosslight's new writing project celebrating art, new writing and the blank page. We will be giving two writers one painting, then allow them to come up with a short five to ten- minute response script based on their reaction to or interpretation of it. We hope the project will allow us to explore how theatre and stories can take root in different mediums, whether in conversation with the artist or shedding light on something entirely new.

In light of Covid-19, we have used this time to proceed with the project by using our own homes as our canvases. We will be getting actors to record their own performances, allowing us to collaborate with different creatives on new exciting and provocative work from the safety of our own homes.

The project will work like a creative relay race. We will be inviting two writers to create an original 5 to 10-minute script in response to a piece of art; this could be anything from a Renaissance portrait to a contemporary, abstract thematic piece. The writers will take inspiration from that painting - its themes, images, colours and/or subject - and write their script in one week. From there, we will pass the script on to actors, without letting them see the original painting or even know who the writer is: this way, the actor is free to create their own interpretation of the script, taking it even further from its original source. A composer will take these videos and write a brief piece of music in response.

We hope by creating this chain of creatives responding to other creatives, without seeing its initial source, we will be able to celebrate individual artists and their craft, while still maintaining a creative conversation with each other. One of Crosslight’s main aims is to find innovative ways to allow various artistic mediums to come together, so this is a prospect we are really excited by. One where we are able to marry and provide opportunities to artists from as many different forms as possible.

We have just finished the second week of the project: the scripts have been written, the composer has written their track and the actors are recording their final takes, still having never seen the painting their script is inspired by. We can’t wait for you to see the hard work that all the team have put into their pieces! Keep an eye on our social media throughout the week for updates and the final videos!