Pier to pier

Alongside Pier dig, and an interactive walking/ drawing game in the festival newspaper, Pier to pier is a participatory performance, a meeting of one space that is lost and another which is very much in existence. In this case it is the melding of the circumference of Portobello pier (in the form of 129 metres of elastic chord) which once stood on this site, and the walking of the length / breadths dimensions from one end to the other of the prize winning pier at Hastings on the Sussex coast. The films document Burgoyne's footsteps walking from one side to the Hastings pier to the other. Of the 15 unique films that result, the participants are each given one recording to follow as a video on their mobile phones. In turn, they lead the rest of the group; the spaces both lost and present expand and contract, as a mobile architectural dance of sorts ensues. After each participant has led the other members of the space, they leave the elastic space, until there is only two left, then one. Paradoxically, only by keeping a distance from each other can the shifting, drawn space exist. In the case of the final two participants, keeping the chord off the sand and maintaining that lost/present space may appear more like a tug of war than a situation of cooperation and togetherness, a manifestation perhaps of being between here and never there