Winner of a Standard Bank Silver Ovation Award on the 2019 National Arts Festival Fringe, Unfathomable is an image-based work that wades, drifts, floats through the waters of unprocessed grief. It seeks out the ghostly presences of those gone and those still alive, to understand their liveliness in death, their ghostliness in life. Tracing the histories of her father and grandmother in a poetic play between materials, body and words, Alex Halligey takes audiences on a swim through lives that couldn’t be contained and those that stayed small for the fear of the size of their spirit. Unfathomable combines Athena Mazarakis’s theatre-making, choreographic and embodied devising approach, Alex Halligey’s writing and performance and Jenni-Lee Crewe’s design. The 2020 Virtual National Arts Festival provides an opportunity to reimagine the work as a series of filmed vignettes.
Director: Athena Mazarakis
Performer: Alex Halligey
Work devised and reconceptualised for film: Athena Mazarakis and Alex Halligey
Designer: Jenni-Lee Crewe
Film editor: Jessica Denyschen