Open Offer - Performance & Creation

Performance

Open Offer for Elbow Room is a twenty-five minute solo performance for an audience of approximately twenty, depending on the size of the space. It was performed three times as part of the Graduate School Showcase on Wednesday the 23^rd September, at 7pm, 8pm and 9pm, in Studio 6 at Laban. As the spectator enters the space, which is completely empty except for a line of hazard tape dividing the space into two halves, she is given an envelope by an usher which reads the following: Here & Now (Sit & Open). The spectator usually sits down on the floor in front of the tape, opens the envelope, attempts to read all the letters in the letter, waits, and then the performance begins. Or has it already?

Open Offer is not created for the theatre with its implication of collective/individual spectatorship and all the other expectations that a theatrical space carries. Out of the comfort zone of the darkened auditorium. There is no room for anonymity here. The piece also does not exist in an exhibition sense; for example, a durational performance installation in a gallery, such as La Ribot’s Panoramix, in which people are free to choose where and how they position themselves in relation to the performer (sitting/ standing/ lying). Through the traditional formal setting and the seated position of the audience the distinction between performer and spectator can be challenged. It was also not my intention to leave it up to the spectator when to enter and exit. Open Offer has a definite beginning and an end. The spectators need to be there with me throughout the performance. This piece is about time and duration and therefore it is important that everyone is there for the whole duration of the event. This fact offers opportunities for meanings to emerge.

[The ...] fact that in theatre – as opposed to other art forms – the production inevitably takes place within the same space and time as the reception puts the audience in a risky position: that of sharing the responsibility of being a part of the whole. (Malzacher, 2004, p.122)

Not placed in a theatrical setting but also not designed as an installation to be wandered through, Open Offer occupies an awkward space. Not only this, it takes place in a studio, more specifically, a dance studio at Laban with all the connotations that this carries. My intention was to make use of these implications in the performance rather than ignoring them. This means to think about the studio both as a space of production and as a time of knowledge. The ground that we, the spectators and I, both stand on is quite literally common; the ground supports us in our co-presence in the space.

Yet, the space is divided into two (through hazard tape) and there are definite boundaries that are established from the beginning. Abrams notes ‘the possibility that in fact the separation between performer and spectator must remain clear for participatory performance to question the relationship between the two’ (2003, p.xiv). As Heathfield points out,

Performance operates by means of a performing subject testing out his or her relation to a site [and] enables artists and spectators – made inseparable from each other – to experience and to think the extent to which a given identity, or indeed subjectivity itself, is moored to a physical place. (2004, p.11)

For Open Offer, I work within the theatrical convention but without the hierarchy of the stage. We are in a studio, yet the mechanics of the theatrical machine can be revealed even more in this environment. We still have a contract, an unspoken agreement.

Creation

When everything has been done before, where does one start? I started the process of creation by revisiting other people’s work. It seems invaluable in today’s (art) world of recycling and deejaying to place oneself in relation to past works. By doing so, new things can emerge.

I became interested in the idea of dramaturgy and how the relationship between text and act(ion), text and stillness, text and body, and text and image can be framed by this. In Open Offer, I am interested in the potential of performance to communicate at a non-verbal level, recognising the importance of silence in this situation. In this way, the gaps between language and enactment become explicit. The rules of how the piece is structured are revealed and made visible and accessible for the spectator from the beginning of the performance. No magic. No make-believe. My props represent the essentials and, at the same time, the realities of performance (and life). Food, water, money. The value of the coins in the cash-box was initially three pounds, less than what I would normally invest in making a performance and less than what I would normally pay to see a performance. Quite literally, with the contribution of the spectator, the value of Open Offer increases with each performance. I decided on a performance style that was matter-of-fact, task-based and non-expressive in order to not distract from the performance itself. I decided that, in terms of timing, things would take as long as they needed to; there is no attempt to speed procedures up. Things are produced right here & now in front of our eyes. No magic. No make-believe.

I am joining the school of patience, in which performance does not equal spectacle and where the people who are working are the spectators as well as the performers. This school is marked by absence, stillness, nothingness, silence, pause, slowness and emptiness. We are trying to make space in order to observe and engage with the act of looking itself. There is a desire to take a more subtle and quiet approach to making performance. Augusto Corrieri (2008) writes about his process of developing his solo Quartet: ‘the “not doing” becomes just as important as the doing; there is an attempt at giving space to the apparently passive elements (stillness and silence), and not just to theatre’s traditionally active ones (movement and sound).’ In 1952, more than fifty years ago, John Cage proposed this strategy for music when he wrote 4’33, his most famous and controversial composition for any instrument, in which the musician does not play a single note for four minutes and thirty-three seconds: silence as music.

My rationale of working with stillness, as opposed to continuous movement, derives from Lepecki’s analyses that ‘the insertion of stillness in dance, the deployment of different ways of slowing down movement and time, are particularly powerful propositions for other modes of rethinking action and mobility’ (2005, p.15). He continues:

Stillness is no longer dance’s other, but it remains outside dance, as a potential, as a ‘system’ which allows the body to ‘incline’ itself towards dancing. Stillness is potential dancing, it is perhaps even the primal source for dancing [as Paxton demonstrates in an approach to perceiving movement which he calls the Small Dance], but it is not quite dancing. (2000, p.342)

What Lepecki is proposing, is a change in the ontology of dance: one that is marked by absence. ‘Under such conditions, the body finds itself in an unstable situation dominated by uncertainty, and staging the performance asserts its absence and disappearance, rather than its existence and presence’ (Dominguez, 2008, p.109). Through stillness itself, we may reconsider our own presence in this situation.

With no other performers, no collaborators, no set, no lights, no music, no costume and hardly any props or make-up, I find myself here & now, in front of you, ready to begin.

Bibliography

Corrieri, A. (2006). Words for later: Quartet and the poetics of performance. Dartington. Retrieved September 15, 2009, from Augusto Corrieri Web site:

http://www.augustocorrieri.com/Words%20for%20later%20-%20Augusto%20Corrieri.pdf

Dominguez, A. (2008). Unstable. In Ballettanz Dance in Art: Ballettanz das Jahrbuch 2008 (pp.104-109). Berlin: Friedrich Berlin Verlag.

Heathfield, A. (2004). Alive. In A. Heathfield and H. Glendinning (Eds.), Live: Art and Performance (pp.6-15). London: Tate Publishing.

Lepecki, A. (2000). Still: On the Vibratile Microscopy of Dance. In G. Brandstetter & H. Volckers (Eds.), Remembering the Body (pp.332-366). Austria: Hatje Cantz Publishers.

Malzacher, F. (2004). There is a Word for People Like You: Audience – The Spectator as Bad Witness and Bad Voyeur. In J. Helmer & F. Malzacher (Eds.), Not Even a Game Anymore: The Theatre of Forced Entertainment (pp.120-135). Berlin: Alexander Verlag Berlin.