Abstract
As part of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad, two quite separate arts projects were created that each included events on and around a boat. In 'The Boat Project', Lone Twin created Collective Spirit, a ‘day sailor’ yacht, which sailed the South East coast of England on its maiden voyage, stopping for performances at harbours and marinas en route. In 'A Room for London', a model of Joseph Conrad’s riverboat Roi des Belges was perched on the roof of the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London and provided ‘London’s most intimate venue’, a pop-up hotel and a space for creative development. The boats provided foci for performances that ranged from momentary ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ sightings from afar to public viewings and events, a day’s sailing or a night on board and longer experiences of supporting or crewing the projects. Between them, the boats were (and this is far from an exhaustive list) seen, touched, sailed, storied, sung, roamed, lived, loved and imagined in ways that were resolutely open. In this paper, I consider the ways in which these performances and the boats themselves were temporarily moored to place. While Collective Spirit made planned stops along a clear route, the recreated Roi des Belges had been cast off course and grounded for a time. To begin to understand performance at temporary stops on and off a route, I develop a theory of performative mooring, to contribute to existing work on mobilities in performance. The paper identifies key features of this theory and applies these to the two projects. In so doing, it discovers languages of the sea that help reconsider site-specific performance.