Output details
35 - Music, Drama, Dance and Performing Arts
Roehampton University : B - Drama Theatre and Performance
Allotment
Allotment, constructed from fragments of performances spanning almost 20 years of practice, engaged with repetition and recycling as strategies of recording. It consisted of three solo performances (Apple/Seed, Sand/Castle, Passion/Flower) in which the fragments were selected and grouped according to their affective content, and re-presented in the form of silent, gestural ‘monologues’. These monologues were interspersed by ‘still lives’ (a small table with various moving objects), animated by an assistant.
The work contributes to a growing body of research into performance documentation by testing the possibility of imagining performances as pictorial communication or ‘language’ systems; at the same time it queries the privileged position of the spoken word in knowledge transmission. A key strategy was to combine previously unrelated and often ill-documented performances into a non-verbal ‘treatise’ on the ‘unspeakable’ struggle, trauma and uncertainty of everyday life. The work emphasized the performer’s inability to verbalise his experiences until he found alternative modes of expression by opening another wound or ’speaking organ’ elsewhere on his body.
The project also embraced the Passion/Flower Dissemination Project (see portfolio for details), which aims to propagate the original solo performance by transplanting it to other bodies and letting it flower there. Whilst acknowledging the privileged role played by language in the development and circulation of knowledge, this dissemination by propagation also addresses how personal knowledge is ‘impassioned’ and characterised by embodiment and experience, neither of which can be solely described or transmitted in the abstractions of spoken or written language. Thus, Allotment’s strategies of fragmentation and recycling, in my own performances and the dissemination project, propose alternative approaches to the exchange of knowledge as impassioned experience.
The portfolio contains video and photographic documentation of the project in solo, duet and group forms; a programmer’s information pack and dissemination ‘agreement’ form; alongside various contextual materials.
