Howard & the characters

Devised and presented as a performance installation, Lightbox is a peep into the worlds that Howard, a factory worker conjures up, as he sits working with scrap metal all day.
The characters, played by the six performance artists who collaborate on this project, disclose identities created in Howard’s mind. Τhe rooms they inhabit give voice to their stories, memories and exaggerated manifestations as he thinks them up. The characters are real people from his life, however his tales of them dramatize, stretch and shift times, places and resemblances to make his own.
He thinks of his mother, Lisa, who worked long nights whilst keeping her son away from the dirt and grime of the world around him. And of Elizabeth, who mourns him, as he imagines her. The tales spin along, of the woman he once loved, Lilith, who went missing and was never found while his mind traces back old Professor Pip, a professor of mythology who is, unnervingly obsessed with the female form while he has no interest in his wife Noora, once a curator at the museum of Oriental textiles, who slowly slips into Alzheimer’s.
The performance piece, comes alive from the installation, from Tuesday to Thursday at 8-9 pm and on Sundays at 7-8 pm. Each character and his world develops as a continuing narrative over the installed period at TAF, from the 15th of April to the 6th of May 2010.