• 2004 Conical performance catalogue text

The Rite of Exit

Part bedtime story, dress-up game and penitent ritual.

Two players compete to exit a darkened room by negotiating a series of leather tiles stamped with Edgar Allen Poe’s classic short story ‘Masque of the Red Death’. The performance draws on elements of Poe’s imagery and combines them with a series of objects and rules that form a directional stepping game similar to dominoes.

Reciting aloud sections of the story specific to certain tiles, the players attempt to plot an exit from a physical space and the fictional nightmare. Sealed loops, dead ends, straight runs and strange turns continually rework the narrative, taunting the audience with an unsettling payoff between strategy and performance.

Pic Poc Poe was originally performed in the ruined abbeys of the English countryside in 1999.

It is now played only on Friday the 13th.