Output details

Home from Home - improvised dance performance

With Dr. Sharon Smith of Gob Squad Berlin, I composed and performed in a research project titled Home from Home. The process involved a minimal amount of devising where scores were written, but not fixed, with the idea that the testing ground for ideas would be in performance. The process explored blurring the boundaries of high art and popular culture, the professional and amateur, through the transposition of Smith’s familial living room to the stage. Smith’s family and neighbor performed with Smith and Cacalano forming the company, The Blue Stocking Social Club.

The project explored notions of performance virtuosity by applying Barthes’ language of punctum, obtuse meaning, and carnival to a theatrical context. This was done in an attempt to develop an ‘aesthetic’ of or, to cite Bailes (2011), ‘poetics’ of, failure. The project challenged normative expectations of entertainment and experimented with mistakes and misunderstandings as a strategy for performing, with the desire to disrupt the normative expectation of theatre/performing.

The insights revealed that the performers’ mistakes provided a spontaneous moment whereby an unscripted mode of performance presence appeared. When executing set material, by opening up time structures, asking performers to primarily focus on the experience of time passing rather than managing the immediate execution of material, a heightened awareness and energy was revealed, in addition to an awkward sense of presence and vulnerability that challenged the audience. While difficult for some audience members to understand as theatre, a result of ‘mistakes’, a loose score and social club atmosphere, audience members who also perform recognized the challenging performance situation that was created and energy foregrounded by the danger of spontaneity. Some audience, however, were not sure how to respond, a consequence of exploring this performance context: the work was presented in a theatre but simulated a social club.