Unsaid. A performance by Kai Lossgott and Anthea Moys. 2007. 15 mins. Johannesburg skyline view.

In 'Unsaid', water enunciates the acts of speech which describe a relationship between two lovers. Standing on two tall plinths, the performance begins with small movements, abstractions of everyday routine, like getting ready to go out and grooming. Drinking from large plastic water bottles, the lovers spit at each other in flirtation. Over time, flirtatious squirts become violent bursts, as they splatter water at one another, sparring it out as they almost fall off their posts. Slowly, they tire. The water loses impetus and fails their purpose. What were once dramatic and passionate spurts now become mere dribbles, lethargic drops from their mouths. With nothing left both man and woman climb down the plinths.

The woman takes her place standing at stainless steel water-filled tub on a table. She drops her head into the tub and tries to hold her breath for as long as possible. Occasionally she tries to speak under water. The woman continues with this process in the futile attempt to 'voice herself' underwater. Over and over again, she comes up for air and then submerges herself again into the water, immersing herself in liquid silence. Occasionally the audience will be able to hear muffled, subdued sounds.

Commanding volunteers from the audience, the man switches off his cell phone and sits down with his back to the audience at a long table behind a candle and a box of red pills. The volunteers sit down at the other end, where the others can see their faces. The man asks: "How can I help you?" and elaborately interrogates and diagnoses their problems, flicking various combinations and prescriptions of red chocolate pills down the table at them. A glass of water is provided to help with swallowing.

These activities carry on indefinitely. The woman will eventually become exhausted and walk out. The man continues to try to 'help' people until they leave the area.

Concept

Fear 'chokes us up'. We 'get a frog in our throat'. This performance is about communication or lack there of - what is said, what can be said, what cannot be said, what we are afraid to say, what bottles us up inside. What we say and how we say it has a ripple effect on the people and the environment around us.

From early feminism right through gay rights and the postcolonial movement, silence has been an important political issue.  South African history has been filled with silent voices and the need to speak out. Unsaid embraces these meanings of silence, but goes in search of a more humble point. The piece is about any successful middle class person today – people who might have everything and yet at the very base of it still fail at all attempts at intimacy. It is about a silencing of self. In Jungian psychoanalytic terms this is the predicament of modern men and women, an avoidance and inability to engage with the world on its own terms - the one too busy diagnosing the world's problems to really listen, and the other too emotionally fractured to really speak. Through this lack of communication, both fail in either giving or receiving human love, as vital to the species as water.

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