Developed during a month-long residency at Site Gallery, Sheffield, and later performed at Maureen Paley, London; Public Relations is a choreographed group action that looks at how movement is used when language fails or seems hard to summon. The work sees a group of performers playing movement based games in an attempt to negotiate collective feelings of social discomfort. This work continues Beech and Thomasson’s investigation into how double standards are performed and upheld collectively.

A group of performers present the audience with a series of movements that systematically come together as component parts of a stage combat sequence. The group collectively performs and records a Foley soundscape, which then underscores the series of violent interactions that follow. Through the repetition of a short sequence of movements and the activation of their clothes and water bottles, the work suggests therapeutic potentials in staging violence without touching.
In Sheffield Lucy Beech and Edward Thomasson worked with a group of performers – Jowanna Rose, Sam Holland, Megan Gibson and Heather Morgan – to explore the notion that a problem shared is a problem solved. The development of the work was presented in the gallery as a game-like process of learning and repeating. The residency culminated in a series of final performances at the end of the residency on 6 February 2016. Following these initial performances in Sheffield, the work as restaged at Maureen Paley, London on 27 February 2016. This iteration of the work was performed by four male performers – Rob Crosse, Sam Holland, Timothy Taylor and Charles Stanford. Though the choreography was largely unaltered, this shift in casting allowed fresh meanings to emerge.