"In this collaboration between one of Britain's leading performance artists and a major independent film-maker, records of Performance Art have been extensively manipulated; the images slowed down, fragmented, details isolated to construct a filmic 'memory' of the events. This process, combined with a jagged editing style, has both reinstated the original impact while giving the film the grainy rough-edged quality of a newsreel. The fiim suggests that Performance Art is not just one of the perplexing aspects of modernism, but that its origins lie deep in the past.

The relics of folk ritual in Britain testify to powerful ‘behavioural' traditions which have survived the transition from an agricultural to an industrial society. Central to these rituals - and similar ones across Europe - is that the ‘acting out' or performance of feelings and perceptions is necessary to re-assert the spirit of collective experience.”

Edinburgh Film Festival brochure