The Ruin
Q&A with Simeon Barclay

In our Practicing Performance commission RIA Presents: Simeon Barclay, The Ruin, Simeon investigates British identity in relation to masculinity, race and class through a poetic text combined with live percussion by James Larter and horn by Isaac Shieh. As Simeon prepared for his first-ever performance work, performed at the ICA, London, he shared some insights into the process.

This is your first performance. What made you interested in moving from sculpture and installation to exploring live work, and how has this shift impacted your practice?

I often think of installation as a stage or set where elements are assembled and positioned. The body in space plays a key role in this engagement, almost like choreography or notation. These considerations are common in performance, but in my practice this is often a residual effect of my installations. This commission has given me the opportunity to pay closer attention to that surplus, realising a work where that is the central focus.

The Ruin touches on British identity, masculinity, and class, as well as your upbringing in Huddersfield. How has your own background shaped the work?

It has served as a material to push around, reconfigure, bolt onto, manipulate, run away from, collapse, and reform — like the eighth and ninth tiers in an evolving spider diagram. It harbours home truths, half-truths, foggy memories and atmospheres and conjecture.

In all these different capacities, my personal history has helped shape and inform the emotional register of the piece.

The performance features a soundscape developed with and performed by percussionist James Larter and horn player Isaac Shieh. How did you approach creating this sonic environment, and what role does sound play in shaping the narrative of The Ruin?

When writing the score with James and Isaac, we made no distinction between the spoken elements and the other instruments, reflecting the dynamic interplay present in the piece. We wanted to distil the nuts and bolts of language, making it more pliable as a way to articulate atmosphere or feeling through sound. The text is an accumulation of sounds or dynamic notes, made resonant by the speaker. Working with James and Isaac I was able to understand how the words I have written are also elements that, when broken down form part of the soundscape, not a layer of meaning that sits above it.

What led you to choose horn and percussion specifically as the musical instruments for The Ruin?

It was important to have a sound palette that was expansive, capable of covering a wide emotional range but I also wanted to keep the ensemble minimal so that improvisation and collaboration would be streamlined and efficient. Finding ways to describe physicality, infrastructure or atmosphere were vital elements, percussion and horn have the range I was looking for. The horn can be muscular, heavy and plodding, but in a shriek, it can convey pain and hurt or a long reaching note can be melancholic. Percussion, on the other hand, has a nimbleness — it brings texture and a roundness to the work with its versatility — it can be sensitive but is able to overwhelm with a wall of sound.

The Ruin blends various musical influences, from early modern music to the industrial sounds of your youth. Can you talk about some of the specific references you looked at?

As part of the R&D process with the RIA team, we looked at everything from early medieval English music, which conveys a sense of nobility and gravitas, to Portsmouth Sinfonia’s deeply skewed, off-kilter, and off-key renditions of popular classics, that give a sense of decayed opulence. There are also examples of ‘sprechgesang,’ a style of improvised singing and speaking, and the all-enveloping wall of sound minimalism of Julius Eastman. We also listened to jazz, musique concrète and a variety of soundtracks from film and television.

The soundscape responds and reacts to your own monologue. Can you tell us about how you developed it and what led you to settle on using your own speech as the core of the performance?

It wasn’t my intention to be so prominent myself in the work; you engage with a process and follow where it takes you. I try to make a habit of writing as a way of mediating and owning my preoccupations and interests. Being so close to the text, it reflects my own phrasing and language. In the end, it made sense for me to directly inhabit that space.

What was the most surprising or unexpected aspect of the process in creating The Ruin? Was there anything that came out of the development process that you didn’t anticipate?

Yes, the idea of putting myself in the hotseat — it’s a vulnerable space. I shy away from the term ‘performance’ in relation to The Ruin, but it’s given me a newfound respect for that field of creativity. The body as material is as direct an expression as it gets, yet it remains this most delicate of offerings.