The Other is a body of work comprised of a performance for camera, a scent narrative, and a tale read collaboratively at a distance, all based on the poem Le Gars (The Kid) written by Marina Tsvetaeva in Prague in 1922. I first came across this poem in the essay Sexual Difference and the Love of the Wolf by Judith Still published in The Animal Question in Deconstruction (ed. Lynn Turner, 2013). This marked the point of my ersonal animal turn, and you can read about some of the early research here - Tsvetava's wolf / in wolf's skin [working title] R&D.

In 2019 I received the Developing Your Creative Practice grant from Arts Council England to develop The Other as a multi-screen piece, plans which had to be re-thought in light of the world pandemic. This became The Stranger. A tale.

Le Gars (The Kid) is a supernatural love story: a young girl, Maroussia, falls in love with a ghoul and sacrifices her life and that of her family while protecting his secret. There is a clear bifurcation between the creature that is the ghoul, and the orderly society to which Maroussia belongs.

In Matters of Care (pp. 32-33) Maria Puig de la Bellacasa recounts Latour’s work, which might help us understand these binaries: ‘…We remain trapped in binary oppositions, in the perception that in order to account for phenomena we need to bridge the gap between two worlds. And even though bridging, we still tend to give one side the power to know, and even do, the other: nature explains society (or vice versa).’

Opera singer Latana Amari Phoung and i read the poem Le Gars while adjusting to each other's physical presence. At one point Latana remarks that the poem is very cinematic in its landscape, it’s full of textures; we take this on board; we use our bodies to understand the trauma the characters went through, their dilemmas and decisions; we practice trust (i walk backwards with my eyes shut) and our ability to read each other in the space. 

It is not until the end of the second part of the poem that the reader learns of Maroussia's resurrection, and that, once again defying the social system she has been brought up to obey, she takes the opportunity to re-join her love, in love and in death. Maroussia gains agency via becoming 'an other' (she dies and comes back to life by his will / curse, only to choose death again); he, in turn, gains agency of his own ceasing to be an unwelcome guest but becoming instead a person worthy of love, care, and devotion, yet only to her - Maroussia.

This poem also makes an appearance in another work of mine, with grandfather (2017), where my granddad reads out fragments from my translation of Hélène Cixous' essay Love of the Wolf, in which she analyses Le Gars (Stigmata, 1998, pp.70-82).