The Great Curdling

The Great Curdling is a Folk-Sci-Fi film, a darkly comic Musical with compositions by Leo Chadburn. It explores the feeling that collective reality at tipping point.  Although the sea is dying, it’s spawning new kinds of life – creatures that are half-cartoon, in the form of tiny flexing hands. A funeral cult has formed, worshiping this phenomena. Meanwhile, a middle-class family are adjusting to a new kind of happy, now they have consumed the substance – a transformative liquid technology that re-structures them from the inside. But something is going wrong, and the father is interrogated by an Alexa-like voice. His answers build a picture of a world where ‘animals ended’ but mourning them is taboo. Meanwhile, on the shores of a strangely altered sea, two outcast women meet accidentally when one of them is attacked by autonomous flying packages. They sing about the Curdlings they have witnessed in their exile – some unspeakable intermingling of bio-tech horror and Fascism, as the funeral cult teach them how to re-format the colonized, curdled bodies of the dead into a new substance.

This work forms a distinct but final part of the series ANIMAL CONDENSED>ANIMAL EXPANDED

The Great Curdling was commissioned by Whistable Biennial 2022 where it was presented as an installation with sculptural elements in an old bank.                         Photo by Rob Harris, featuring Sheila Hyde as ‘Surgeon’ and Alison Edmundson as ‘Teacher’

 

          Film still featuring John Wagland, Mo Wagland and Alma Wagland. Cinematography by Paul Tarragó

 

At Whitstable the work was accompanied by a series of live performances called ‘The Error Mode’ 

The Curdles, whose bizarre costumes collide PPE suits, horned mutant creatures, and tattered shreds of English flags, performed a live musical Sermon at Dead Man’s Corner on Whitstable Harbour. This 15 minute Sermon expanded upon the world of The Great Curdling, and provided the audience with the advice, warnings, and chastisement needed to survive.