John Berger & Simon McBurney: The Vertical Line
4 - 7 February 1999
Aldwych Tube Station (formerly The Strand Tube Station)
Our light flashed onto a mammoth, then a bear, then a lion with a semi-circle of little dots which seemed to emerge from its muzzle like drops of blood, rhinoceroses... We saw human hands, both positive and negative impressions. And a frieze of other animals 30 feet long. Everything was so beautiful, so fresh, almost too much so. Time was abolished, as if tens of thousands of years of separation no longer existed. We were not slone, the painters were here too. We thought we could feel their presence. We were disturbing them... Jean-Marie Chauvet on discovering the cave in the Ardeche, December 1994.
"This way please, this way, down the tunnel..."
Over four nights in February 1999, the writer and art historian John Berger and Theatre de Complicite's director Simon McBurney and the actress Sandra Voe conducted an intimate 30,000 year old journey, inscribing a downward line through time 30 metres below central London.
Part theatrical event, part archaeological dig, The Vertical Line was an oratorio of faces, voices, darkness and light; a one-off excavation for small groups down 122 spiral steps into the bowels of the disused Strand tube station, where a sequence of audio-visual installations culminated in a live performance on seven occasions. A fifteen minute radio version was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in June 1999.
An underground folly built at the end of the last century, the Strand Station's two platforms simultaneously serviced an under-subscribed shuttle between Holborn and Aldwych. One closed in 1907, the other in 1994: on the same date, we later discovered, as three French spelologists led by Jean Marie Chauvet first opened up the cave in the Ardèche gorge.
Bush House to Fayum, change at Corsica for Chauvet. Cued by the lure of sound and light, each visitor explored the station's deep walkways, tracks and tunnels: the intervention of video portraits etched by light onto shaft walls; mattresses sitll strewn on platforms uninhabited since the Blitz; painted animals on the rock - unseen yet glistening. We moved through these abandoned zones by instinct, guided over the tannoy by the ghost voices of an older man, a younger man and a woman; by the dead sound of George Formby, the World Service and the wind.
Half way down and we're in Corsica, lying on those mattresses and listening to the gale blowing as clouds roll above the platform. Its 3000BC. "The dead in the menhir stand in front of the living to keep them company".
Finally, the running tunnel leading to Holborn where British Museum treasures were protected during the bombing. Pitch black and utter silence. Then the sound of footsteps from the other end. "Can you hear me in the darkness?" and those same voices - John's, Simon's and Sandra's - breathing by our shoulders, whispering in our ears: yet still unseen. We can even touch them. Slowly, surely, we begin to see the cave-bear, the haematite, the ochres and the browns through that deep, forgotten darkness at the end of the Vertical Line far below London.
Michael Morris, Co-Director, Artangel
This project was supported by Arts Council England, Special Angels and The Company of Angels
The Vertical Line was an Artangel commission and part of INNERCITY, a series exploring the interface of the city and the word in its many forms. INNERCITY encouraged writers and artists to excavate a range of urban environments and to contemplate the chnaging nature of the city and the counterpoint between narrative and place, between language and location. Presented in association with Theatre de Complicite.
