the meeting place:Chapter One of Autobiography in Five Chapters

‘We spend our whole lives reliving, re – enacting, re-imagining, and returning…..A single gesture is inexhaustible and endless, a single emotion echoes across lifetimes and family trees’ Bill Viola Autobiography in 5 chapters is a provocative challenge to practice and performance boundaries. It investigates the emotional landscape of our human existence. The work is the culmination of a long research process and questions that come from my own experience and that of others. Autobiography is an attempt to arrive at the point of knowing more about our human existence. Each chapter is an attempt to weave the delicate fibers of human behavior in order to explore an unseen world of feelings. CHAPTER 1: THE MEETING PLACE explores the uncanny repetition of dreams and memory which are combined to push the boundaries of perception. CHAPTER 2: HIDDEN THREAD explores the past, what do we remember and how whilst looking at the encounters with the self. CHAPTER 3: SLICE deals with multiple and conflicting narratives of loss and the violence and beauty of human relationships. CHAPTER 4: SILENT SERMON/THE MISSING SCENE allows us to be alone with our thoughts and gives us the spaciousness to begin to recognize the nature of those thoughts as Lama Dagyab Rinpoche states ‘to express portions of our inner and outer reality to remind ourselves of particular links of significance or meaning.’ CHAPTER 5: SEPARATE OTHER looks at identity and of the individual’s fragile relationship with society. The recurring themes throughout Autobiography confront inner and outer lives, toying between the public and private and the complexity and ambiguity within them. Autobiography evokes and challenges our innermost limits of human experience and the conflict that dwells within the epicenter of our existence, helping to redefine our own internal space and to reconcile us with ourselves. CHAPTER 1: THE MEETING PLACE “I know it wasn’t a dream…dreams don’t happen that way. I never once imagined it was a dream…” The audience is divided into two, the performer moves within the space, combining live images with recorded images, sound and the visual environment. She is a woman, she disappears and reappears on film, she is a sleeper, she is caught wandering between waking and dreaming, she is looking back unable to return, she is searching in the dark for traces of light…. THE MEETING PLACE is a highly visual work using video, stunning soundscape and live performance. It is an exploration of identity/memory of inner and outer realities to reveal the in-between, while delving into the world of the uncanny ‘something strange yet familiar’. It investigates the live (the ephemeral that which cannot be reproduced) through a co–existence of the technological (as medium that is not dictated by a point in time). The Meeting Place conveys complex and contradictory information that disturbs our perception and subsequently calls into question our understanding of the self. The Meeting Place is an intimate 30min performance work for a limited capacity. It involves a self-contained performance and audience space, and requires a flexible black box or gallery space, considerable get-in time and technical support. Available Autumn 2005 – Spring/Summer 2006 CHAPTER 2: HIDDEN THREAD “Possibly the most startling thing about our individual existence is that it is continuous. It is an unbroken thread”. A durational performance that investigates the meaning of memory, time and identity, where the spiralling continues, encounters with the self and confrontations with others are recognised. A journey of self-discovery, a female self in an anonymous urban environment I walk the streets of a city departing from one location to arrive at another leaving a long strand of my unravelled knitted dress behind me. I am mapping out my journey. I am involved in the landscape leaving a footprint, a singular action and unplanned traces. I will employ the language of knitting and unravelling too formally and metaphorically, evoke the complex unravelled interiority of our human emotions and memory. I have drawn upon the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur as a thematic framework to engage with the importance of history and re appropriation of imagery. HIDDEN THREAD explores the dialect between inner and outer worlds, between complexity and clarity, between space and enclosure. These narrative investigations will exist through examining the live through a co–existence of the technological and the relationship between the application and effects of pre-recorded material in real time performance practice. A combination of thought, image and sound, HIDDEN THREAD comes in two strands: DOCUMENTATION: A journey of self-discovery, walking the streets of a city leaving a long strand of my unravelled knitted dress behind me, mapping out my journey. This encounter recalls traces of past in the hope of constructing something new, connecting what may appear dissimilar to achieve new insights and understanding. The meaning of unwinding provides a subtle metaphor for fraying human connections, which underpins the repeated narrative as well as, the rhythm of knitting together the relationship between body and architecture. PERFORMANCE INSTALLATION: In a darkened space I will unravel the knitted dress I am wearing to create a cell (inspired by the cage beds used in Eastern Europe for mental patients). I will inhabit the cell evoking images of a molecular organism: a singular unit. Simultaneously a womb, a cocoon, spaces that explore, through metaphor, aspects of human pain or suffering, yet at the same time speak of warmth and nurture. The creation of the woven cell creates a winding cross –connected enclosed complex interior space. There is a metaphoric significance to this visual imagery which helps to remind us of our inner complexity and to revel in it without getting disentangled or lost. Surrounding the cell are five domestic monitors each presenting the documentation of the journey through the city. These multiple images are fragmented, delayed, looped and repeated manipulating time and perception. TEXT: The text / narrative created for the piece will be collected from a series of sessions with a hypnotherapist specialising in regression, accessing unconscious memory gestures, sounds and noises, SOUND: Fusing sampling, scratching and mixing with fragments of this text, a lyrical and haunting soundscape will be built. Exploring its relationship within the space of creation, the soundscape will essentially be concerned with the tonal design of space as integration into the specific place of performance. Hidden Thread examines the experimental investigation of the aesthetic correspondence between visual and audio forms. As performer I will navigate through a pool of sounds, noises, melodies orchestrating a dialogue of responses and reactions, questions and answers, call and response. We will explore content and context in order to discover unconventional structures and create a new sound perspective. Hidden Thread brings together artistic practices that combine the different levels of expressions to take advantage of the possibilities of the transformation of visual, pre-recorded, audio and spatial. CHAPTER 3: SLICE In March 2002 I fostered my niece Kady 1 year later she left. Slice is an exploration of the subtle interplay between hidden levels of emotion and intention that circulate within family relationships. It captures momentarily a portrait of the complex coexistence of two languages, simultaneously saying different things. Slice investigates the intimate territories of public and the private, examining notions of hiding and revealing, screening and disclosing, seeing and half seeing, arrival and departure. Slice creates a landscape of evocative atmospheres which leave a poignant evocation, a feeling of loss. Two screen projections1 performer, 1 child, immersed in the act of human communication, exploring the tension and the tenderness that lie at the heart of human relationships. An emphasis on lighting design (to create an aesthetic of absence and the recurrence of emptiness), sound and abstract narrative are the creative ingredient for this performance. CHAPTER 4: SILENT SERMON A PRIVATE ENCOUNTER Think of a moment when you wanted to cry and you didn’t……. silent sermon is an intimate private encounter for an audience of one. On entering a darkened space a dialogue has begun, the performer and audience sharing together a desire to experience an honest truth on an intimate level. It is an exploration of authenticity, the artificial and the real, where reality and fiction are continually interspersed and performance and memory are delicately intertwined. silent sermon invites you into a space in – between searching for the ambiguity between realities, when manufactured emotions become a real emotion that triggers a memory. The tears are intended to destabilise the audience members as it becomes impossible to detect where the false tears start and real tears end. The audience is given a choice where to look, between the live action and the video relay of the same. They become aware of the double sense of performance, witnessing the performer remembering and forgetting but in the end there is nothing left only silence. Silent Sermon is a one minute performance for one person at a time, in a small studio space. CHAPTER 5: SEPARATE OTHER The performer is held motionless like a piece of sculpture silently observing. The vocabulary of minimalism resonates personal and social meaning. Taking Simone de Beavouir’s The Second Sex and Jorgen Leth’s 1967 film The Perfect Human (which presents a pseudo-anthropological analysis of human behavior) as starting points, Separate other investigates the notions of the self, identity and displacement. It is an interrogation of woman, a woman of dual heritage, provoking an artistic social dialectic whilst exploring the complexities of the body, through visual, textural, and gestural languages. Separate other is a moving self-portrait exploring and examining my personal and cultural duality / identity. The interrelation or interaction between these two cultures will be explored through a series of contrasts, alternations, oppositions and symmetry in order to challenge against the vertigo of anonymity. I will explore the social and political implications of seeking out a definition questioning complex social structures to discover the individual within the workings of social machinery. Separate other is an engagement with time, space and the human body mediated through the video. The language of video and a set of creative constraints will be the subject of the work (which is mediated through a solitary individual).Video is also used as an intimate way to study and expose the role of audience / performer relationships questioning the notion of other. The ‘musical composition’ also plays a central theme in the piece and I will be exploring this through my collaboration with Cellist Julie Campbell. Examining these constructions of images, sound and narrative will further the experimental artistic process and push my artistic practice to new levels. Separate Other is an intimate performance for a black box performance space, for a limited capacity audience.