Wetherell, M., 2019.

It's Hot, It's Not

Reckless Sleepers is an extraordinary company who make work between visual art, dance & theatre. This surreal, funny & carefully crafted physical performance explores the weather in all its forms & takes delight in discovering the world anew & how we experience it differently, wherever we are.
In the summer we produced a text. "It's hot" referring to the ambient temperature, "it's not" referring to a cold glass of water. In the autumn we advanced this word play assimilation into gestural assimilation so that a simple action would evolve & grow into something bigger. A relaxed stretch (as if on a sun lounger) becomes a two man rowing race, a fan becomes a wave, a wave becomes a sequence of swatting an imaginary fly.
And so It's Hot, It's Not was born. We'd found a new process of generating performance materials. Something playful, something familiar to the worlds that we create, but different enough to be a challenge.
It's Hot, It's Not is inevitably about the weather; we've experienced the hottest, wettest & coldest temperatures on record and of course we cant ignore this. But it's not what a project is about that interests us, it's about what it does.
It's Hot, It's Not plays with the idea of accumulation and cause and effect. Gestures, movements and objects move in and out of focus; they get collected, they get bigger, they get smaller, they get used in different ways. Ideas and stories appear and disappear, like a child looking up at the clouds and noticing what they look like, what they imagine them to be, what they could be - and then the wind changes and the next formation appears, and the game begins again.