Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
Goldsmiths' College
Ballgame
Ballgame is a 153-minute play written for single voice. Performed in the tradition of a radio broadcast, Ballgame is a play-by-play account of a mathematically average baseball game. A male actor announces the imagined game in real time with no ambient sound.
Ballgame attempts to keep history and the present, fact and fiction, and perceptual encounter and imaginative reconstruction, in tension, through the scripting and recording of a purely composite event. Composed of nine innings of continuous speech laced with silence, a live event is conjured through the careful balance of analytical, descriptive and anecdotal language culled from the game’s history.
The script is constructed from a 100-year history of baseball statistics, which are used to calculate all aspects of a mathematically ‘average’ game. The predictive capability of statistical information and mathematical formulation has enabled me to construct composite history, in the form of a perfectly plausible but as yet unplayed game, freed from time or place.
Ballgame was supported by Arts Partners in Creative Development, Canada. ‘Inning 1’ was published in F.R. DAVID (deAppel: Amsterdam, 2011). The full script will be published in JANICE KERBEL: COLLECTED SCRIPTS, JM Barnicke Gallery, University of Toronto, 2014. Ballgame is in the collection of the Booth School of Business, University of Chicago.
