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The Frequency at the Wires

This article covers the 2017 Newcastle premiere. For related stagings of the Leif–Katita embrace across theatre, see The wires hold (Site-Specific Dance-Theatre).

*The Frequency at the Wires* stages a single image from the novel's opening: Katita wheels the unconscious Leif across the parallel wires strung between the rooftop of Bolton Street car park. Rather than dramatise the scene, Gooding's choreography suspends the moment in durational repetition—a 3-hour cycle in which two dancers (one sighted, one blindfolded; roles rotate each hour) navigate actual steel cables strung between the car park's upper levels.

A third performer traces the *shadow* of the two dancers across the concrete floor in chalk—a phantom body made of light that the dancers must continually "catch," fold into their embrace, release. The work has no plot. It is a study in erotic interdependence: if one dancer cannot see, the sighted dancer cannot move through the architecture without the blind one as ballast, as weight, as the force that keeps her from slipping into the empty world.

The apparatus of touch

The central innovation is the refusal of rescue narratives. When the sighted dancer (Katita) makes a gesture of care—a hand to the shoulder-blade, a pause at the ribs—it is answered not with passive gratitude but with counter-pressure, reciprocal movement. Each body reaches toward the other not because connection is assumed but because vulnerability is known to be continuous. The reaching *is* the erotic act: the extended hand across the void, the uncertainty of whether the other hand will meet it.

The blindfolded dancer moves by breath-sound and pressure. To follow the other's breathing is to surrender to their bodily rhythms, to allow their body's pace to govern your movement. This is neither domination nor submission but negotiation—the body's language of love in a world where two people cannot move alone. ^{[1] [1]}

Installation and temporality

The rooftop becomes apparatus: railing as touchstone, wind as fourth presence, the city of Newcastle spread below as both civic witness and irrelevant background. Live prepared instruments—strings struck with pebbles, car-park rust, scaffold poles—generate a low drone that shifts frequency each hour. By the final performance-slot, accumulated chalk from the shadow-tracing forms legible marks on concrete, a dust garden recording the traces of every loop.

The work's temporality mirrors the cycle: no single performance contains the whole; each audience member enters partway through, witnesses fragments, exits before the end. Continuity exists only in the chalk, in the accumulated erosion of shoes on the same pathways, in the performers' slow familiarity with the wires.

Reception and critique

Critical responses divided on whether the work honours or eroticises the vulnerability it stages. Gooding's notes position the piece as investigating "the erotics of care, not care as erotics"—a distinction some found clarifying, others insufficient. The premiere occurred during heightened discussion around disability representation in Beach Surgery performance. Accessibility documentation (tactile maps of the rooftop, descriptions of visual elements for blind audience members) was distributed; debates continued about whether requiring audiences to navigate active dance-space constituted meaningful access or staged bodily risk [citation needed]. “The work does not hide the blind dancer; it does not make visibility the condition of erotic legitimacy. This is a rare staging.” ^{[2] [2]}

A proposed 2021 revival did not proceed [citation needed]; a 2023 restaging is in discussion with funding bodies.

See also

• The wires hold (Site-Specific Dance-Theatre)
• Newcastle adaptations
• The erotics of Leif and Katita
• Experimental theatre and Beach Surgery
• Disability representation in adaptations

References

1. ↑ Samara Gooding, artist notes, *The Frequency at the Wires* (2017), unpublished. Archived at Newcastle Art Gallery & Library.
2. ↑ "The Frequency at the Wires," Newcastle Herald, June 18, 2017.