February work outline

Wed 08/02 – evening

Group outing to Musis Sacrum for a concert of music by George Crumb, George Antheil, Aaron Copland, Steve Reich, Elliot Carter, Charles Ives.

 

Thu 09/02

Discussion about Dakar trip

Feeback from Matt Mullican Class of Masters in Amsterdam

Discussion of Claire Bishop’s text Unhappy Days in the Art World?

– questions of de/re-skilling, especially in relation to our own situation

– performance art is already de-skilled theastre, which is why the relation between performance art and theatre is especially tense. Implication that performance art does not require or involve any kind of training, practice, ‘skill’.

– are we being trained? discovering? learning?

– what’s the role of repetition in relation to training?

‘Directing’ exercise

Group divided into 3 to develop preliminary performances based on blog ‘exquisite corpse’ text

lunch

Presentation of works to each other. Developed an experimental structure, drawing from some aspects of the exercises described in Theatre of the Oppressed. One group performed, one group occupied the role of the ‘director’ and one group that of the audience.

After the first performance, the directing group were invited to make an intervention into the performance, to change it in some way.

– question about why the directing group would change the work they’d seen, according to what?

– issues of trust – that the directing group had to assume responsibility for their instructions, of taking intention away from the performing group; the performing group had to allow for the directing group to give them instructions.

The changed work was then performed (again).

After the first round, the audience group were subsequently asked to leave the room while the directing group were speaking with the performing group, and to then give a response to the changed work.

Resulting questions:

– how do we occupy these different roles?

– developing a vocabulary between us that we also want to challenge e.g. the way in which repetition or copying one another’s actions has become a performance style/trope.

– what is directing?

For next time:

– a video recording of the session was made which we will watch on the Wednesday evening

– perhaps an exercise that involves some advance rehearsal could be interesting

– possible area still to address is that of speech, maybe some voice warm-up exercises?