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Toured

The Vertical Line

Over four nights in February 1999, the writer and art historian John Berger, director Simon McBurney and the actress Sandra Voe conducted an intimate 30,000 year-old journey, inscribing a downward line through time 30 metres below central London.

Part theatrical event, part archaeological dig, The Vertical Line was an oratorio of faces, voices, darkness and light; a one-off excavation for small groups down 122 spiral steps into the bowels of the disused Strand tube station, where a sequence of audio-visual installations culminated in a live performance.

Jean-Marie Chauvet on discovering the cave in the Ardèche, December 1994

'Our light flashed onto a mammoth, then a bear, then a lion with a semi-circle of little dots which seemed to emerge from its muzzle like drops of blood, rhinoceroses... We saw human hands, both positive and negative impressions. And a frieze of other animals 30 feet long. Everything was so beautiful, so fresh, almost too much so. Time was abolished, as if the tens of thousands of years of separation no longer existed. We were not alone, the painters were here too. We thought we could feel their presence. We were disturbing them... '

Michael Morris - Co-Director, Artangel

'An underground folly built at the end of the last century, the Strand Station's two platforms simultaneously serviced an under-subscribed shuttle between Holborn and the Aldwych. One closed in 1907, the other in 1994: on the same date, we later discovered, as three French speologists led by Jean-Marie Chauvet first opened up the cave in the Ardèche gorge. ...' More

A site-specific production for the disused Aldwych tube station, London in February 1999. A fifteen minute radio version was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in June 1999.