Afreena Islam-Wright’s Meet Me At The Cemetery Gates (MMATCG) is a quiet, searching text-and-audio piece that was presented online by Coney in March 2021. It was offered as the first of that spring’s ‘Rapid Scratches’ – a series of experimental performances continuing the exploration of participatory digital theatremaking that Coney began during the UK’s first lockdown. This initial enquiry, activated through 2020’s programme of ‘Remote Socials’, was shaped by the instability of its context, grappling and improvising with a number of unfamiliar platforms in an attempt to determine how Coney’s work might adapt. These events were often acts of translation, or playtests, that asked how familiar formats might move online: escape rooms, for example (The Escape Zoom), or murder mysteries (You Hold The Crocodile’s Jaws).
In the 2021 season, Coney’s pool of artists offered pieces that felt more habituated to the pandemic’s conditions, and whose forms were native to the world it was making: quiet works that paired structured conversations with moments of release into individual reflection. Understandably, the Rapid Scratches seemed particularly preoccupied by the textures and temperatures of isolation: Eve Leigh’s Words Fail … and Deborah Pearson’s The Anonymous Kind, for example, found challenge and care in solitary encounters with screens. MMATCG shared these curiosities and moved among similar questions, asking what isolated audiences might offer to a dramaturgy of grief.
Meet Me At The Cemetery Gates opened Zoom’s strange privacies towards a calm and graceful mourning. It was part of a pattern of pieces in Coney’s new season that were designed to be experienced alone, but which began from a quirk of pandemic living – the suddenness of leaving a digital gathering for the solitude of one’s home. The evening opened on Zoom, with Coney Director Tassos Stevens introducing the piece and its creators, and offering the audience a chance to introduce themselves in turn. A link was given to the piece; the audience then turned off their microphones and cameras, reinstating the unscrutinised space beyond their screens. After a blinked moment of privacy, the link works, and the work begins. Technologically, MMATCG is simple: a combination of timed text, audio recordings, and navigation between pages. The first text fades into view, line by line. ‘Hiya’, it reads; ‘You can imagine we’re at the cemetery gates’. ‘Thanks very much for meeting me here’, continues a recording. ‘I’ve been spending a lot of time here since lockdown. It’s a beautiful space.’
The work’s first moments, then, are prefaced by a renewed awareness of each listener’s isolation. Despite the solitariness of its performance, however, Meet Me At The Cemetery Gates is well titled; its movements grow from a sense of encounter, a feeling of someone at your side. In theory, the work is a walk: its structuring conceit is an imagined journey around Gorton Cemetery, where the narrator’s father is buried. In truth, however, its main movements are through time. The piece’s primary mode is reflective, rather than descriptive: the narrator talks about her father and his life, thinking through how he lived and died, and how he is being remembered. This reflective quality works with the solitary circumstances of its performance, Islam-Wright’s delivery bringing an intimacy to isolation, a poised, gentle presence that honours the privacy out of which the work began. MMATCG accompanies its audience, quietly thinking, offering its prompts without pushing: each segment’s transition-buttons are twinned with the text ‘Then, when you’re ready, walk on’. The piece’s movement is structured as a series of invitations, leaving each listener to travel through it at their own pace. In her work’s openness, Islam-Wright proposes the solitude of the screen as a place to think alone, together, performing the work of working out: the felt-for adjustments and slow understandings of grief.
This working-out is a work in progress. A scratch piece, the presentation of Meet Me At The Cemetery Gates lacks ‘finish’: the quality of the recordings is variable, and the design of its pages is simple and sparse. This might be a problem for some, particularly those who are beginning to tire of the ‘throwntogetherness’ of some pandemic-era digital theatre. The season’s small shift in nomenclature – replacing ‘Remote Socials’ with ‘Rapid Scratches’ – might even hint at an awareness that a certain set of conventional professional standards are returning, requiring a caution that these things have been made quickly, are not ready, not finished, not ‘done’. For me, however, this lack of finish is the heart of the work. MMATCG is not simply in progress but has its existence as progress: Islam-Wright’s gentle grief is a walking with loss, not a walking away from it. It would be odd, somehow, to hear MMATCG in a final polished form; the piece performs unfinishedness, uncertainty and disorientation, the struggle to relate an altered self to a changed and changing world. Its unevenness is a product of care: the work has not been left unfinished but is fundamentally unfinishable, springing from and speaking to something that is rough and in its essence unready – not and never to be done.
This aesthetic also affects the way the piece speaks: informal and unassuming, MMATCG’s provisional quality eases the closeness of its encounter. In its unfinishedness, in its solitariness, the work offers itself gently, moving alongside its listeners with patience as they pass through the spaces of its imagination. At time of writing, MMATCG is about to be performed in person, as part of the postponed tour of tiny travelling arts centre Cap & Dove. The freedom this will afford, however, should not obscure the strengths the work has found as it has reached across distance. In its digital form, MMATCG has noticed an opportunity for tenderness: a way to keep company, meeting people privately, with grace, making an asset of their isolation.