Ted Bundy visits Manchester

I’m sitting on a train between Manchester Piccadilly and London Euston, hurtling away from two weeks at Contact Theatre thinking and making around The Ted Bundy Project as part of the Flying Solo Commission.

I’m thinking about stories and why we want them; why we seem to naturally impose them on our chaotic, mysterious world. I’m wondering what my reading of the story of Ted Bundy says about me; what I’m looking for in myself by making a performance about it and what I’m looking for in each of us as individuals and all of us as a group.

Over the last two weeks I’ve sat in a room, moved around a lot of post-its, wasted time, made a flurry of performance experiments, realised some of what I thought was wasted time was actually useful contemplation, shared some material, talked about it and–just before getting on the train to London–had coffee with a trio of university lecturers interested in males and violence. One of them told me there was such a thing as Serial Killer Top Trumps.

I’m still doing a lot of wondering at this point in the process: wondering what the possibilities are when a group of people sit in a room together, wondering about men and violence, wondering how far is too far, wondering where compulsions come from and wondering why we call people serial killers.

I’m excited to see what will happen.

Images by Rod Farry