8.08pm: The show has started without me noticing. Busy reading the programme notes for Memories Are Made of This… for the third time, I missed the five members of Croatian performance collective BADco. ‘invading the space’ – our space that is. The bar area in Chelsea Theatre. It becomes clear immediately - we are in for a rather unusual performance. No three-minute call, no proscenium arch, no reminder to turn off the phone, no artificial darkness, no anonymity.
In the short ‘introduction’ that follows we are invited to join the performers in the two gallery spaces as they explain that they wanted to expand the walls to make a bigger space and put fake grass on the floor so that we ‘could all sit down and have a picnic’. Then we are lead into the auditorium.
The space has been transformed: five long tables, at each a performer, five audience members, a radio and a photocopy of F Scott Fitzgerald’s story The Crack-Up (on which the performance is loosely based). Are they memories?
The room is quickly and quietly filled with whispers. There is a feeling of secrecy and intimacy in the room.
There are fragments of dance too. I cannot stop looking at the pregnant dancer’s belly. She is so close to me that I imagine I can hear her baby’s heartbeat.
And there is more text. More words. More movement. Dancing in front of a ‘snowing’ screen. Incidental music playing from the radio. It comes and it goes. Words appear as quickly as they disappear. It is the images that stay in my mind. One dancer moving and speaking in Croatian in front of the screen. One of the other performers who is watching her laughs out loud at what she is saying. The atmosphere is intensive but relaxed.
It’s the end. There’s applause. Bows. The usual.
As I think about what just happened on my way home, it occures to me - Memories are made of this.
A.H.
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 23rd 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.
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
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.
Laban, 23rd September 2009
Dear Spectator
She invites you to read her performance.
10. Absence or The End.
Yours sincerely,
A.H.
Central Line, 24th September 2009
Dear Performer
I invite her to read my letter.
Yours sincerely,
A.H.
11 Burgess Road, 25th September 2009
Dear Spectator
She invites you to read [1] her letter.
Without you, this performance will not happen.
Without you - here and now - this time and space is wasted.
Without you, I have no reason to be.
The symbol for fish.
Water. Body. Difference.
Fish. Water. Difference. Body.
The human condition. From here to there. We. Two.
Literally.
Slowly.
Repeatedly.
She believes in honesty. http://www.babynology.com/meaning-antje-f24.html
To stand in front of other people. To be there. To be present. To be visible.[4]
8. Her trainers and Gordon in our ‘current economic climate’.
9. Bad, Le Sacre Du Printemps, Loops, The Time of My Life, Beat It, Blaubart, Exercise Piece, Be My Baby, Thriller, Cafe Müller, Changing Steps, She's Like the Wind, Earth Song, Kontakthof, Rebus, Hungry Eyes, Billie Jean, 1980, Solo, Stay, Wanna Be Starting Something, Nelken, Sounddance, Yes, The Way You Make Me Feel, Two Cigarettes in the Dark, Blue Studio: 5 Fragments, You Don't Own Me, Man in the Mirror, Viktor, Fractions, Hey Baby, Smooth Criminal, Palermo Palermo, Exchange, Overload, Remember the Time, Nur Du, Beach Birds, Love Is Strange, Heal the World, Der Fensterputzer, Beach Birds for Camera, Where Are You Tonight?, Black or White, O Dido, Biped, In the Still of the Night, Gone Too Soon, Wiesenland, Interscape, Big Girls Don't Cry, Dangerous, Für die Kinder von gestern, heute und morgen, Fluid Canvas, Will You Love Me Tomorrow, Scream, Rough Cut, Squaregame, Cry to Me, Stranger in Moscow, Vollmond, Split Sides, Love Man, They Don’t Care About Us, Bamboo Blues, Views on Stage, Do You Love Me, Invincible, Sweet Mambo, Eyespace, Some Kind of Wonderful, You Rock My World, New Piece, Nearly Ninety, These Arms of Mine.
The End of Jérôme Bel’s The Last Performance, and André Lepecki.
A tribute to some of the famous people that have fallen to their deaths this year: Michael Jackson, Pina Bausch, Merce Cunningham and Patrick Swayze.
You may leave what you have been given.
You may leave.
The Here & Now.
Yours sincerely,
A.H.
[1] to look at and understand or take in (written or printed matter); to look at and say aloud; to have a certain wording; to interpret in a specified way; to interpret the significance or meaning of; to register or show; to make out the true nature or mood of; to interpret (signs, characters, etc.) other than by visual means; to have sufficient knowledge of (a language) to understand the written word; to undertake a course of study in (a subject); to gain knowledge by reading; to hear and understand, esp. when using a two-way radio.
from http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Read
[2] http://www.thefreedictionary.com/change
[3] Quote from Building a Potential Structure - A script of the Performance by Patricia Lennox-Boyd
[4] Quote from A six-thousand-and-forty-seven-word manifesto on liveness in three parts with three interludes by Tim Etchells
