Watson and the hare circle each other like twin satellites: dependent and responsive, yet never fully merged. The artist toes a line between reverence and co-dependence, occasionally lingering at the periphery of the stage—hesitant and yielding. The delicate tension between reluctance and magnetism represents a deeper interpretation of the artist and their creation; the body and its own generative force. Watson alludes toward an eternal return, where creativity persists beyond presence.⁵ The hare’s position after the event of its ‘passing’ refuses closure—the haunting figure loops and rejects the fixity of time, asserting distance and autonomy in bursts of unrequited guidance. On occasion, Watson reaches to seize the hare’s torn sleeve—a limp remnant draped from its shoulder—clinging steadily to the animal like an anchor. Whilst Beuys’ performance imagined inseparability in death wherein the hare became a part of him, Watson’s [hare] is an object of impossible intimacy—a silent other whose understanding can never be reached, untamed and unsettled in Watson’s trying embrace, free from the heavy permanence of death.

I can see pieces of Beuys “peppered in there” but it’s a complicated relationship.⁶ The resonances are latent, perhaps perceptible primarily to viewers attuned to the legacy of the late artist. Where Beuys’ performances mythologised the self as shamanic guide, Watson undermines grandiosity with absurdity and dissonance. Rather, Watson enacts a subversive re-routing: a quiet and veiled revolt against the myth of mastery in performance, embracing movement unburdened by conscious control or authorship. Watson’s ‘explanation’ unfolds as a negotiation in real time—part pursuit, part surrender—where the aim is unattainable. Meaning is not declared, but devoured. Objects are menacing ‘bugs’ of ‘pure physicality,’ rather than icons.⁷ I am reacquainted with the colourful mechanised heads that invert signs of sanctity—glitched, ridiculous and divine in their ugliness. Like unsuppressed thoughts, they surface without a necessity for decoding, however are undeniably reminiscent of Beuys’ gold-leaf and honey-coated face in 1965. Unbound by rational comprehension, they convey an “emotional directness via Watson’s cryptic combinations of personally infused objects.”⁸

Watson draws focus to the foot as a site of departure and return—a bodily boundary and point of origin that anchors while simultaneously offering escape, unsettling familiar assumptions about where emotion and meaning take hold. By inverting the traditional hierarchy of the body, working from the ground up, the choreography challenges ballet’s inherited decorum. Gliding across a blood-stained floor, the dancers’ gestures evoke a state of disembodiment. Distilled into hypnotic taps and deliberate contortions, the artist’s foot is a diverting ‘trick,’ searching for a frequency the hare might recognise.⁹ Watson recalls Gerard Manley Hopkins’ theory of ‘sprung rhythm’—a metrical foot shaped by the cadences of nature and speech.¹⁰ The elasticity of sprung rhythm avoids fixed patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables, enabling Hopkins to break from rigid metrical constraints while retaining a rhythmic pulse. This produces verse that moves with an organic cadence—a quality reflected in Watson’s fluid movement. In my dialogue with Watson, he insisted “I don’t want to aspire towards machine-ness,” favouring a kind of ‘burning off of excess’ that feels raw like a ritual purge. This is articulated in the hare’s final, dreamlike monologue and chant, “I burn off my excess, I burn it all the time.” The phrase draws direct relations to Georges Bataille’s theory of ‘the accursed share,’ in which art, ritual and even violence are understood as essential outlets for surplus energy.¹¹