‘PORTE COUCHERE’ EXHIBITION OPENING WW BLOCK, AUT, MOUNT ST, AUCKLAND
4PM FRIDAY, 28.08.09
After working with performers other than myself in a live improvisation and response situation in Test Site 03 I gave myself a brief with altered parameters for my 4th test site which was to be part of the Porte-cochère exhibition. In Test Site 03 the performer worked blind folded, using only the live response sound score translated to her through headphones and based on the imagery she was creating with her body via the little wireless camera attached to her. There became a dialogue between the two performers and the separate spaces folded in on one another.
For Test Site 04 the first condition was to work solo - and put my own body at the centre of the work.
This created new sets of conditions or rules as I figured ways to negotiate the live event with a ‘single body’.
The second condition was to do away with the blindfold allowing the performer (myself) to see.
The third to create a residual artefact an integral part of the work.
The first condition created the biggest shift. In order to generate a sound score to work from, I had to do some preparatory work that could be incorporated into the ‘live’ performance. This gave the work an added dimension of alternate time and place. Devising this in an alternative space from the ‘presentation’ I worked with the wireless camera, improvisational structures and the characteristics of the space. Making a 20 minute improvisation with my body and the camera I recorded the cameras perspective for the duration. Playing this footage back I made a transcription of the recorded footage. Contained by the frame I interpreted the scape through describing the tones, shapes, lines, angles – observing the environment without naming the structures themselves. e.g. the door was a oversized blue rectangle This resulted in a detailed word-scape that was converted to real-time speech for the ‘live’ event. The sound output was audible only to myself, transmitted using Apple’s text to speech function and played through wireless headphones. The limitations of software offered no option for making ‘space’ in the monologue. I tried dashes, dots, multiple comma’s and still ‘Vicki’ my chosen orator wouldn’t perform a pause. To overcome this I had to write ‘pause’. Not wanting to hear ‘pause’ repeated tirelessly as an aspect of the performance I decided to create a more useful device – I incorporated somatic ‘pauses’ that in performance I would always attempt to maintain as a ‘subtextual’ layer to the body. So at points in the text where there was stillness, the voice read words like – ‘pause and breathe, soften’ – ‘breathe, focus on your connection with the feet’. This created a ‘virtual’ mix of body and space, and a compositing of the ‘past’ space and the ‘live’ space. For the opening performance I ventured forth into the foyer of the Dadley Building in Mount St and working with my body and my imagination ‘performed’ the score I was listening to through the headphones.
This test brought the notion of another space to the fore and a folding of two spaces occurred. It also raised questions such as should the audience hear the sound? The choice to keep this secret was primarily driven by preference for disengaging with the cognitive or the symbolism and associations that are caught up with language. To locate the reading of the body through the somatic as opposed to semantics, accessing a language as distanced from cognitive processing as possible.
In Test Site 03 the performer was blind folded. This gave the audience members freedom to indulge in a voyeuristic viewing of the performer. In Test Site 04 without the blindfold the audience were unable to escape the close proximity of the performing body without becoming part of the spectacle themselves. Anticipating that this intimate setting would be challenging and also wanting to maintain a sense of ‘screen’ between the audience and the performer I worked a gaze that was focused on the space in between the audience and myself, allowing the audience to see me, without me ‘seeing’ the audience. This was admittedly difficult to maintain at such close quarters and needs some rehearsal.
This took the work to another level, and in the context of an art opening it was an acute reminder of how the coding of space informs our physical behaviour. Placing the primordial language of the moving body in this small and transitional space can make the body appear alien and strange. This initiated some reflection around spatial coding and the screen/body.
This ‘performing’ screen/body performed the space not only in the corporeal, but in the ‘live dancing screen performance’ projected in the alternative space. This performance was recorded and is currently being exhibited in the same space it was recorded in. Thus it becomes a recording of the screen/bodies dance.
