The Crossing is an ongoing collaborative investigation between playwright Jo Clifford, landscape architect Lisa Mackenzie, composer Peter Nelson and choreographer Claire Pençak.

‘She lays at the Crossing.
The Goddess.  Laid at the Crossing.
Where the water is dark
And the currents are strong
And the outlook uncertain.’        Jo Clifford

Ideas

Peat  is where the earth remembers.
Remembers the pollen blown in the thousand year old wind.
The seeds and fruits of the earth of the Bronze Age and before.
Layer on layer of memory.

Peat  is a poetic image for the memory of the body which is etched with the life we have lived.

‘There is a strange power in bog water which prevents decay. Bodies have been found that must have lain in bog for more than a thousand years….’ Danish Almanack 1837 quoted in The Bog People by P.V.Glob

Peat bogs are strange and eerie places in which our normal perceptions of the world seem turned upside down. Scattered on the surface of their dark mysterious pools – dubh lochan - are the empty husks of moth cocoons that act as reminders of the world’s seemingly limitless capacity for transformation.

In the Museum of Scotland is the oldest representation of a female figure in Scotland.
A goddess carved in oak and buried near the crossing she guarded at Ballachulish. This crossing was a dangerous tipping point between past and future. The crossing whose strong currents and tides can sweep the unwary traveller to destruction.
This was the Goddess people prayed to, to keep them save through the perils of transformation.
They buried her there to remember and to keep the memory safe.
The memory of the things of the earth that we now choose to forget.

But in every other way we forget.
Forget our links with, our roots in, and our dependence on the earth.
Perhaps it is no coincidence that Alzheimer’s is so huge a scourge of the Western world. A condition that erodes memory. Perhaps it is because we are forgetting so much that is crucial of our links with the world, that we are so often forgetting our own selves?

Our project imagines an encounter between an old miner/peatcutter and the Goddess.
The Goddess has lost her power: the miner has lost his mind.
The encounter is mediated by a Shaman, a Guardian of the Crossing: an androgynous figure who acts as a catalyst for the two energies, and the transformative power that emerges from their encounter.

The Crossing is a performance piece, a creative interpretation of these ideas through text, image, design, music and movement.