This was a project initiated by Duncan Molloy (writer and director) about the fairytale The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Andersen. It is a tale told in seven stories and if you want to know more about the fairytale you can read it
here.
Duncan had asked five people to visualise five parts of the story. He started the presentation by telling the first part of the story, "About the mirror and its pieces" to the audience. I was asked to transform the 5th story. It is called "The little robber maiden" and it tells how Gerda, the heroine of the fairytale, is captured by robbers while she is looking for her friend Kay, whom she loves dearly. She is brought to the robbers' castle, where she is befriended by a little robber girl, whose pet doves tell her that they had seen Kay when he was carried away by the Snow Queen in the direction of Lapland. The robber maiden lets Gerda go but keeps her muff because she finds it so pretty. She gives Gerda her mother's gloves instead to keep her hands warm in Lapland.
This is what I made: I took my old gloves and embroidered the
names "Gerda" and "Kay" on the inside of the gloves. When the audience was ready for the 5th part of the story I presented them the gloves and asked somebody in the audience to wear them. The names were invisible, nobody (including the person wearing them) knew they were there. For the rest of the performance the names were warmed by the palms of the hands of the person wearing the gloves.
(Ideally everybody in the audience would get a pair of gloves and after the performance people are told they can take them home. Maybe they will never discover the names on the inside. Or maybe they will get a letter with the gloves, not to be opened until they are back home. The letter will tell them to look inside the gloves.)
Duncan performed the last part of the story himself. He sat in the middle of a dark room, headphones on, concentrating on something happening inside his head while the northern lights were projected onto him.
