Sara Giddens 1965-2023

I met Sara in 1986: she was an undergraduate student and I was a lecturer in my first job. In 1990, we started working together professionally, never imagining that what had begun then would thrive and develop into the distinctive practice of Bodies in Flight.  Since Sara’s untimely death in December 2023, many have testified to her warmth and generosity of spirit.  Here, I want to celebrate the ferocity of that spirit at the heart of her (and so, my) practice: an unswerving determination to make the best work possible in any given space at that time with those resources, both human and material.

As co-directors, I used to say Sara saw bodies on stage differently from me: where I saw images and stage pictures, she saw gestures full of time and meaning, the concreteness of her choreography countering the ephemerality of my text.  Over what were to be the last two years of her rich and wonderful life, we edited and wrote Flesh & Text – a book about the company, reflecting on over thirty years’ collaboration and more than twenty projects, performed in theatres, galleries, on the streets, in gymnasia and community spaces – so many wonderful instances in the making and sharing, doldrums and tempests, scrapes and ecstasies.  Reflecting on all that togetherness, the intimacies of making art with collaborators amongst audiences, I have now come to understand that what I appreciated most was Sara’s will as an artist, always to make the most sincere and felt, most brave and daring work.  This will inspired me never to lose hope in our sometimes absurd attempts to realize our almost impossible ideas.  She inspired me to reach beyond what was easy and comfortable towards something deeper, maybe more troubling, maybe more exhilarating, always more true.

Flesh & Text will stand as a fitting record of her sustained and fearless career as an extraordinary artist. Having finished most of the work on the book, the last task we completed together was a postscript, intended to inspire new generations of performance-makers, to shine a light into the future of what might be possible to achieve in theatre.  Now I feel this postscript, reproduced below, reads as a testament to her as an artist and her enduring impact on all those with whom she collaborated and all those who experienced her work.

We began this book with an image taken during work on Constants: it’s one of very few we have of us in the act of collaborating.  In 1997, the world of making small-scale experimental performance seemed rich and full of possibilities: the Arts Council readily funded work focussed on developing the art-form; there were many promoters and venues in both major cities and small towns ready to take a chance on a relatively unknown company; and as importantly, there were audiences prepared to experience new work with fresh ideas.  Now, in 2023, that ecology does not appear so robust: audiences are starved of opportunities to experience new work outside of occasional festivals; and there is only a patchy, underfunded infrastructure to nurture and support the new, emerging generation of performance-makers, let alone sustain the careers of experienced artists.  So, making this kind of work becomes even more an act of both faith and will: despite this, we hope this book has inspired you to such acts.  It seems fitting to end this book with Sheila’s final text from Constants, as she sits in the dead centre of the shared performance space and muses on her own mortality:

Sheila speaks:

She will have said when the time comes, do you think me will turn in on itself, like the patterning of a shell? Like all nature goes that way. Turn and turn in, ever inwards. And never arrive. So maybe me like so. Me gets so small it cannot be seen, cannot be felt in the room. And keeps turning in on its own deep space, keeping me me, as this flesh fails, must surely fail, and you pronounce me dead and cry for me, who suddenly gets so small I cannot be measured, but must be assumed, in the minds of those who loved me, still to remain somewhere elsewhere untouchable, as theoretical me. So tiny I am, to all intents and purposes, and for all considerate hearts, everywhere.

SIMON JONES, Director of Bodies in Flight