Boat

Site-specific amphibious rubber boat performance

Background

Boat is a kind of meditation on the dimensions of individual experience - with collectively-made commercial breaks, musical interludes, technical difficulties, an arrival, and lots of wondering about how to hear like another...

Using the distances created by the Ankarsrum Badplats, the (slow) mobility of an electric boat motor, and playful use of walkie talkies to create a sense of closeness and distance, Boat draws audiences to both sit back on the beach and enjoy, and to ponder the gaps in communication/communion they have with the peers right next to them, much less those of one 100 meters away scooting around on a rubber boat in the lake… Over the course of the performance, this gap is playfully probed and problematized by playing freely with loud acoustic sound heard from far away, and closely-miked (and imperfectly transmitted) intimate speech transmitted by walkie talkies to the shore.

Boat came about from a proposal/invitation from the organizing team of Collision Points festival, with the only stipulation being that “we see you on a boat.” In the days before the festival, a rubber boat was inflated, batteries were charged, and a script emerged from a playful exploration of the stage, remoteness, closeness, walkie talkies, and the sounds only you can hear.

Premiered at the Collision Points Festival in Ankarsrum, Sweden, 4 July 2026

Photos by David Agila