The making of ‘ Oh Monster!’

'Oh Monster!' is a dance/theatre/visual art performance piece created jointly by dance artist Ellen Kilsgaard and visual artist Chris Crickmay, who both also perform within it. Starting as a performance research project and then developing into an actual piece, first a solo and then a duet, it has been developed intermittently over a period of four years and performed in a series of showings of work-in-progress in the United Kingdom and more recently in Copenhagen. In giving an account of this particular piece and how it was made, the article comments generally on collaboration, on working across art forms, on working methods in devising, and on the aesthetics of relationship in performance. It also looks in some detail at the use of objects as part of a performance landscape. Underlying all this are ideas about perception, embodiment and image. Taken together these concern the ways in which we relate to the world and make meaning within a performance practice.