Handsome Dog Presents
Don’t Exaggerate
“I believe the experience of history is an experience of pain… Just as the individual, in the years following trauma, likes to recall it, so does society insist on reproducing its dislocations, but always in a laundered way, which invokes necessity. ‘Struggle’ is a word much beloved of the left. It has lost its meaning, become stripped of its pain, and cloaked in anodyne romanticism- that anaesthetizes memory. The individual is robbed of his experience of agony by being forced into a participation he could not at the time recognize … This returns me to the emphasis I place on the individual as the centre of all resistance. Solzhenitsyn tells us that the most successful resisters in Stalin’s camps were the religious, when they must have been persistently battered by a conventional wisdom that told them religion was a comic characteristic of pre-civilisation.
Two Ukrainian Plays
‘Two Ukrainian Plays’ produced in association with the Finborough Theatre.
To mark the critical success of ‘Pussycat in Memory of Darkness’ and to show our solidarity with the theatre-makers and performers in Ukraine, who continue to work during this time, there were two performances on
- Thursday, 8 December 2022 at the ProEnglish Theatre Hub, Kyiv.
- Saturday, 10 December 2022 at the National Les Kurbas Centre, Kyiv.
War Requiem
A six movement montage, in honour of those who have been affected by war particularly atomic disaster, continues to have significance in the year that the U.K. has decided to renew Trident, its submarine-launched ballistic missile.
This project was conceived, in anticipation of the 70th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, which will be held next year 6th and 9th August 2015. The instrumental music from UK electronic band UNKLE’s 2007 album "War Stories" provides the score and the film was made in support of Stop the War Coalition and The Campaign For Nuclear Disarmament. 2016 also pays tribute, internationally, to the work of Stanley Kubrick, and James Lavelle of UNKLE presented, the anti-war artist Peter Kennard's interpretation of Dr.Strangelove, and a contemporary critique of the current view on Nuclear, in his exhibition "Daydreaming with Stanley Kubrick" at Somerset House.
The Red Dagger: A History of the City of London’s Weapons of Mass Destruction
Today the City of London remains, like the monarchy, untouched by modernizing legal regulations, despite an evolving global landscape, and the developments in technology. "But the City of London is the goose that lays the golden egg,' its apologists say, to ring-fence it with superstition: ‘If you disturb it, you do so at your peril, for it’ll just fly away, and use much needed capital to enrich another nation."
Heathcote William’s poem points out that London’s square mile, like Wall Street, is “really a drug den” for “thieves... For, according to Sigmund Freud, Wealth’s a drug of which addicts need ever-increasing doses, to function in their dysfunctional void.
c As being enslaved by such a drug widens the empathy gap, the well-heeled and minted don’t have to imagine, how the other half lives; being convinced that their status, allows them to overlook compassion.”
The Beast of Brexit
A profile of our recent national history, an investigation of what referendums tell us about democracy, and how burying the past can hide it from plain sight so that the world continues as if nothing, when everything, has changed.
The conservative party of Great Britain are well known for their efficiency in dealing with dissent within the ranks and their ability to hide unseemly behaviour.
Taking each of the Brexiteers in turn we see how the rest of the world can be mute when believing in Little England and how much this myth disguises a sordid Empirical past: “Left to their own devices, the natives would rely on nothing but the instant carbohydrate gratification of the plantain.” These are the words of acclaimed journalist, former Mayor of London, and so-called “national treasure” Boris Johnson. He with other ‘also-rans’ are attempting to persuade us to isolate, ignore, and punish the European Union, by leaving it at a critical moment of our civilisation’s development. Running away and hiding behind the vainglorious dreams of Empire and Colditz is nothing but an arrogant two fingers to the future.
The Beast of Brexit is a reminder of the dark side of British character.
Previous projects
Kozmos
January 2011 - April 2011
First staged as a series of video art installations, using the music of UNKLE, at the National Center for Contemporary Art Moscow, KOZMOS was an artists’ collective formed by curator Margaret Cox, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of man's first flight into space, the flight of the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin on board the Soviet spacecraft Vostok.
The Compound
December 2009- April 2010
Set at a Fundamentalist Latter Day Saint Compound in Southern Utah, "The Compound" is a raid/seige drama focusing on the moral twilight of life in a Polygamist cult. The FBI suspects the charismatic leader Brigham Meecham, of hiding a pedophile ring and munitions factory. A young ranger Harp Madsen is given federal powers to investigate the allegations.
Transferants
November 2007 - May 2008
Transferants are those people who unconsciously redirect feelings, who misappropriate to the present a relationship that was important in their past, who redirect their feelings and desires from childhood toward a new object in the present, or who reproduce emotions relating to repressed experiences from the past to the present.