Output details

Dream-work

DESCRIPTION

An ambulant performance in public space, extending Jones’ exploration of collaborative devising practices, particularly the relationship between performance and everyday life. Its initial trope was the daily commute in urban environments. Successive iterations considered how inhabitants’ narratives could be integrated into the performance.

Jones’s contribution: conceived and co-directed performance-walks, conceived and constructed interview material, authored or found and prepared texts and lyrics, conceived and consulted on documentation. [See portfolio for credits.]

RESEARCH QUESTIONS

How can devising performance practice explore:

1. the relationship between everyday habitual practices and contemporary constructions of self?

2. everyday experience of urban environments?

3. communities’ construction and meaning-making of local history in relationship to place and architecture?

4. the use of wireless, audio technologies in public spaces?

APPROACHES AND CONTEXT

In terms of ambulant performances, sonic and performance artists have tended to work discretely, focusing respectively on creating sound environments or interpolating performative material into sites. Furthermore, that material has tended to extremes of invisibility/visibility, either happening alongside and unbeknownst to users of the sites, or intervening obviously in their conventional use. This project produces new insights into how sonic and performative elements can be combined in a public space to create a wider range of interventions from the invisible to the highly visible, passing through the barely visible, thus exploring the minima of performance activity required to aestheticize the everyday habitual use of public space [see questions 1 & 2]. Emerging from the successive iterations was how to integrate local inhabitants' interactions with the collaborators [see question 3]. Jones developed insights into the relationship between performance and everyday life, developing a theoretical model using Heideggerian and Levinasian phenomenology. [See publications.]

DISSEMINATION

Through performances at key festivals; publication of findings, following papers at key conferences; DVD documentation detailing the various manifestations. [See portfolio for details.]