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Mr Goodwin, (Touring Performance), Triangle Theatre, Roehampton University, Leverhulme Trust, London, UK

Richard Talbot claims 100% responsibility for fundraising and authorship of this practical project and the supporting article. This project interrogated the exclusions of “excellence”, by looking to carnivalesque aspects of the Olympics. The project, funded as a one year Leverhulme Fellowship (£16000) brought together multiple perspectives on the Olympic event, with reference to Jane Hampton’s account of the 1948 Olympics (2008), in selected communities of the London Boroughs of Richmond and Wandsworth, and at universities in London and the North West. The project culminated in performances to coincide with the Cultural Olympiad Open Weekend in July 2010.

An achievement of the project was the application of a performance persona, “Mr Goodwin” concurrent with a wave of Immersive Theatre and Live Art work on persona (see Coney Theatre and Oreet Ashery.) Here the Immersive environment is predominantly created in the private sphere and experienced as intimate co-presence with a persona. This persona was deployed for interactions in small community clubs to invited groups and to individual homes. Talbot uses the character to recruit a widespread team of misfit “sports instructors”, and link topics of endurance in extreme sports (see Taylor, 2010) informing a theorisation of durational performance. For Talbot Mr Goodwin becomes a metonym for performative oral history and embodied memory collection.

The project was devised from a base at Whitelands College, Roehampton University in a collaboration with the School of Human And Life Sciences. Discussions with Dr Ian Pickup on primary sports education and Prof. Cecilia Essau on psychopathology led to an investigation of reflections on childhood embarrassment and of enforced performance in sport. Expanded into a discussion about anxieties, depression and other psychological problems, interactions aimed to collect embarrassing memories of childhood sports using parodic practical activities and exercises