Output details

'If to Drift 2'. Installation and performance. Hassall’s solo performance resulted from an invitation from Marilyn Arsem (artist, founder of Boston-based interdisciplinary artists collaborative, Mobius www.mobius.org and faculty member of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston) to participate in a research-based residency in Maine, which takes place annually. The 2012 residency involved Arsem and Joanne Rice of Mobius, Sandra Johnston (University of Northumbria), Alastair MacLennan (University of Ulster), Natalie Loveless (currently undertaking a doctorate at the University of California, who participated remotely via digital media), and Hassall. It took place from 30 July to 8 August 2012.

Each participant assumed responsibility for the production of work during one day of the residency, with collective, recorded discussion held at the end of each day. Participants developed shared methods for their research, including: (i) use of another’s performance, as a starting point for knock-on responses throughout the day in the same, or a different or related space; (ii) use of judiciously ‘performed’, carefully ‘attuned’ (spoken) text to layer, alter and/or transform structural/functional/behavioural (normative) relations with a space or place; (iii) in public spaces, individual performances (and individually choreographed performances incorporating others) that would be publicly experienced as ‘unsettling’, evoke a ‘presence of absence’, be covertly discernible and simultaneously there and not there. Elements of the work in Maine were then brought back to the space at Mobius, where participants made performances with the collective title 'If to Drift 2'. Hassall drew on his own interests/strategies to explore how his affection for the familiar might be surrendered via collaboration and by taking on someone else’s practice methodology (an enquiry begun in past collaborations with TRACE Collective). He also wanted to explore how to maintain this methodological approach in performance to allow for transferable, diverse and discontinuous embodiments, not reenactments: embodied moments were revealed at threshold points – within the body of the performer and via objects brought back from Maine (assembled resources, for adaption). The initial, Maine performances had been conceived for, and conditioned by, the particulars of spaces – domestic sites, retail outlets, woods, a harbor, a former place of worship – and Hassall had written texts for these contexts, layering them over each other, misplacing site-specificity to critique and confound location, function, architecture and history. His subsequent editing and performance of them at Mobius effected a further separation of the texts from their initial sites of production.