• Resilience Training Performance  Score

  • with Olivia Webb and Oro Group

  • Site Specific Performance Work
  • SCAPE Public Art
  • Christchurch
  • November-December 2021

  • Photo: Stuart Lloyd Harris

Video:  Corban Tupou

Resilience Training was a voluntary public performance artwork by Olivia Webb that intended to help us prepare for the seemingly unending series of crises that define our world today. Extreme weather events, pandemics, and cultural traumas do not conform to our demarcation of time; they don’t end abruptly with a change in season. We will inevitably face more hardship in times to come. Resilience is hard to define; we are encouraged to ‘hang in there’, ‘be kind’, ‘look out for one another’, and ‘build resilient communities’. Webb asks, what if resilience is like a muscle that can be strengthened and prepared before challenges arise?

Webb and Meek collaborated to choreograph and score a procession of virtues that occured on Saturdays throughout the 2021 SCAPE season. Costumed in black utilitarian overalls, and carrying musical instruments, a small group of performers navigated a circular route, pausing for musical meditation at each of Webb’s four sculptural sites. Selected performers transported a living worm during the procession, caring for this worm as if it were the last worm on earth, and understanding that its life is of equal value to our own.