School photo (1977).
BLUE MURDER
(1997)
Duet • Live performance • Siblings • SoundBlue Murder was a collaborative project between Robert and his sister Esther, developed from memories of their childhood relationship and the elaborate games of fear and retaliation that characterised it. Drawing on a shared fascination with horror films, the work revisited the siblings’ encounters with fright-night movies and the macabre imagery that populated Robert’s bedroom, alongside the elaborate ways in which Esther learned to get her own back on her older brother for frightening her.
Developed in response to a call for the Trash Commissions at Chisenhale Dance Space in east London, Blue Murder brought together texts, images, choreographies and an accompanying soundtrack. Its material was drawn from the siblings’ shared history, combining affectionate recollection with the darker, stranger and often absurd aspects of growing up together. The work explored the particular intimacy of sibling relationships, where shared memories, private jokes and childhood fantasies can become material for performance.
Blue Murder was fully developed and rehearsed but, due to ill health, its premiere was cancelled. Despite subsequent attempts to find an alternative date with Chisenhale Dance Space, the work was never presented. It remains the fully realised Pacitti production that never was.
REFLECTIONS BY ROBERT
In his memoir Abracadabra, Robert writes:
‘On Friday nights, when there wasn’t school the next day, Esther would regularly climb in beside me and we would watch a late night double bill of old horror movies. These were totally age inappropriate but somehow we managed to swerve parental intervention and scare ourselves silly watching old b-movies, Hammer Horror films and the like. The ‘Bride of Frankenstein’ with her two-tone gravity defying hair and shrieking hiss, or ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’, very much the antithesis of Esther’s little Mr. Men book collection. We watched ‘The Invisible Man’ and wondered if he could be real, experimenting with wrapping toilet rolls round our heads to find out. And whilst ‘Creature From The Black Lagoon’ gave us both the chills, it was ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ which particularly terrified Esther - especially when a dog runs towards the camera and we see that it has a human face.
I was also a young avid collector of glow in the dark skeletons, books about horror films, and Airfix model kits of characters from famous scary movies. I would spend hours meticulously glueing together and painting plastic replicas of Dracula, Frankenstein, Wolf Man, and The Mummy, which then adorned my room. This was all great fodder for me as an older brother to delight in frightening Esther.’
CREDITS
Date: 1997
Place: (intended) Chisenhale Dance Space, London
Duration: 60 minutes
Text, image, sound, movement: Esther Pacitti, Robert Pacitti
Context: A Chisenhale Trash Commission