As part of Ben Judd’s Stanley Picker Fellowship project The Origin, a series of workshops, performances, talks and tours took place at Stanley Picker Gallery, a boat moored in Kingston Upon Thames and online throughout June and July 2021.

For our final event, Kingston School of Art Drama students Louise Hall and Jessica Saunders performed Time Shivers, a piece of prose composed by local writer Jim Dunk especially for The Origin. It weaves the narrative of two young women, a hundred years apart whose lives are connected by The Origin, the Thames and the Hogsmill, and the community that surrounds us.

The piece was performed on board the top deck of the boat, witnessed by an audience, passers-by and those in The Boaters pub garden next to our moorings! At the Gallery it was presented within the installation, and in collaboration with KSA Dance students Libby Canagasabey and Lucy Beadle whose improvised movements inspired by the text, The Origin, and the music playing within the installation, which had been composed by KSA Music. With Louise, who played the ‘older’ character, wearing a costume made by KSA Fashion as part of the wider project, this truly was a cross-disciplinary collaboration.

Jim Dunk is a locally-based writer, theatre and screen actor, and theatre director who has guest lectured for KSA Drama. Jim lead Creative Writing workshops as part of The Origin site-specific workshop programme and is also a member of The Bradbury, a local community centre for the active over 55s, whose Storytelling and Creative Writing groups, directed by Jim, participated in #TheOriginKingston online last summer – see what they came up with here.

Ben Judd’s Stanley Picker Fellowship project The Origin reflects on Britain’s island status, both literal and metaphorical, and how islands shape the communities that live there. The Origin brings together the communities surrounding the Stanley Picker Gallery – from Kingston University students and academics to local networks, charities and residents – and asks them to imagine a classless, stateless, humane society based on common ownership. A temporary community, an experiment in living, a fictional island group. This collaborative project culminated this summer with an installation at the Gallery, a boat on the River Thames and a series of performances, workshops and events – a rehearsal for an alternative future.