The Visitor

A pilot project for Hull City of Culture, The Land Of Green Ginger

The day is like many others, you get up, you go to work, you go to school, you drive out to the woods, you cook the food, you cut the hair, you plaster the ceiling, you police the streets – you do whatever your day normally asks of you; you meet friends, colleagues, family, people you’ve never met before and people you meet everyday. You walk through town, you sit waiting for the bus, you stand in the garden as the kids play inside. All of this happens as it usually would, it’s your Tuesday, your Wednesday, as it always is. Except today you have with you a new friend – unknowable, companionable, silent, enchanting and massively wild: The Visitor.

The Visitor is a unique ‘one-to-one’ performance encountered by many thousands as it moves through the spaces and places of everyday life. A diverse and eclectic range of individuals from across a community, from Councillor to taxi driver, window cleaner to teacher, spend the day - their usual working day - with an enigmatic creature, a beast - wild, playfully unruly, unthreatening but a little unsettling all the same; our world, and more specifically its host community appear equally unusual to the beast. In a variety of locations and contexts those two worlds meet, as a way of finding out about a community through a direct meeting with those that live in and around it; what is it like to live here? What happens here and why? What’s the character, or set of characteristics, of this place? Welcoming in a wild outsider, a visitor from another place altogether engenders those questions and works to highlight the often invisible, overlooked qualities and dynamics that constitute the places we call home. The Visitor is equal parts true-life adventure and research catalyst - a way to meet a community on its own terms, in its private and public spaces, engaged in the business of its everyday life.