|
|
« October 2005 |
Main
| December 2005 »
Mike Pearson and Mike Brookes will be offering the second of our Presence Workshops in Exeter on 8 March.
In a series of performances since 1999, Pearson/Brookes have explored studio-based practice as a mediation of specific sites and events.
who are you looking at? – performed in Cardiff, Wales over three nights in February 2004, formed the second part of their collaboration with writer and director Ed Thomas.
The piece proposes strategies for re-imagining the city in a revelation of personal material and experience.
Mike Brookes describes the piece:
An installation and performance presentation built on core material produced in collaboration with five young female performers - each documenting 3mins within a particular public city centre location, on the same evening: producing footage, of each location, from three simultaneous and expanding points of view.
The event was performed by Brookes, Pearson and Thomas - working around a large central table, on which was arranged all the necessary equipment and material [...] to structure the progression and juxtaposition of this material live within the room of the developing installation.
In their work, documentation acts as an axis to explore the presence/absence of objects, images and experiences transposed into performance.
Mike Pearson trained as an archaeologist. Between 1972 and 1997 Mike was involved in a series of key performance companies based in Wales and working across Europe, including RAT Theatre, Cardiff Laboratory Theatre and, from 1981, Brith Gof.
A major documentation of Brith Gof’s performances is being developed at Stanford as part of Michael (Shanks)’ Metamedia Lab at http://metamedia.stanford.edu:3455/BrithGof/Home. Michael was a company director of Brith Gof from 1997 until the company closed in 2004.
Mike Brookes is an artist and designer whose performance work focuses upon 'the production of durational objects and interventions, holistic ambients, radical structures of presentation, and context specific performance works.'
An earlier Pearson/Brookes performance, polis, realised over three consecutive evenings in September 2001, comprised twenty-five performance fragments, realised in five phases of five simultaneous acts, across the centre of the city.
Small groups of spectators produced documentary traces of these events, along with personal material.
Simultaneously, within the developing structure of an installation, Mike Pearson and Mike Brookes effected a re-presentation of these traces, producing
An installation that combined multiple projection and video monitoring; with maps of routes and locations; texts; polaroid photographs; an evolving and complex sound ambient; and the accumulation of artifacts and traces resulting from the performers' processes and activities, and the spectators encounters with them.
Pearson/Brookes explore the material and immaterial traces of action and place in the performance of events just-passed and the re-presentation of one site through another.
Their work is concerned with the mechanisms in which the presence of actions and events are mapped and re-enacted.
Mike Brookes website and documentation of Pearson/Brookes work is at http://www.mikebrookes.com
Images from who are you looking at? Pearson/Brookes/Thomas.
Images of polis Gerald Tyler.
Images courtesy Mike Brookes.
Matt Adams of Blast Theory has accepted a four year University Fellowship here at Exeter.
During our collaboration Matt will be associated with the Centre for Intermedia http://www.ex.ac.uk/drama/research/intermedia/welcome.shtml
Led by Matt, Ju Row Farr and Nick Tandavanitj, Blast Theory is renowned internationally as one of the most adventurous artists’ groups using interactive media, creating groundbreaking new forms of performance and interactive art that mixes audiences across the internet, live performance and digital broadcasting.
Day Of The Figurines, 2005. Copyright Blast Theory. Photo: Nicola Dove.
For the past four years Blast Theory has been exploring the convergence of online and mobile technologies in collaboration with the Mixed Reality Lab at University of Nottingham http://www.mrl.nott.ac.uk/
Day Of The Figurines is a major new project being developed with MRL alongside Sony Net Services and the Fraunhofer Institute as part of the European research project IPerG (Integrated Project on Pervasive Gaming).
The piece was piloted in July-August 2005 and will be fully developed through 2006.
Mapping players’ real-time gaming via mobile phones from any location, through figurines occupying a model of a fictional city, Day Of The Figurines explores action, identity and interaction in reversals and exchanges between real and virtual social and political spaces.
Day Of The Figurines, 2005. Copyright Blast Theory. Photo: Nicola Dove.
Blast Theory describe the premise of the piece:
Day of The Figurines is set in a model of a fictional city that is littered, dark and underpinned with steady decay. From the Gasometer to Product Barn, the Canal to Rat Research Institute, up to 100 players roam the streets, defining themselves through their interactions. A gunship of Arabic troops appears on the High Street. Scandinavian metallists play a gig at the Locarno that goes horribly wrong. How players respond to these events and to each other creates and sustains a community during the course of a single day in the city.
The company has also been commissioned to create a major, new permanent installation for THEpUBLIC in West Bromwich UK, due to open in 2006.
Using Augmented Reality, Flypad will generate avatars from a 'data body' - information submitted by visitors on their entry to the gallery and as they progress through the space.
Flypad. Permanent commission for THEpUBLIC's new building, West Bromwich, to be launched in 2006. Copyright Blast Theory.
At the installation, up to twelve players will be able to fly their avatars through the gallery’s large central atrium, while attempting holds and forming moves with other avatars.
In its appearance, Flypad draws on Peking Opera, Mexican wrestling, facemasks, and skydiving.
Matt suggests that:
The whole work springs from the architectural location [….] What we're trying to do is make sure that the virtual representation and the real space which sits around it are as seamlessly interlinked as possible, that there's a very fluid relationship between the two [...] the sense of play that you will experience as you dart between real and virtual, and experience the frisson of this difference, is a very important part of the pleasure of it.
Blast Theory's complex and immersive game-structures distribute player-presence across multiple and incongruent sites and networks.
During Matt’s Fellowship we will be developing critical frameworks through which to engage with Blast Theory’s radical work.
As part of this, we will be documenting the development of work by the company through the Presence Project Collaboratory.
Blast Theory’s website is at http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/
Vayu Naidu will be offering one of our series of six Performing Presence workshops on 22 March.
Vayu is a performance storyteller ‘committed to the renaissance of storytelling as a performative art within contemporary culture’.
These images are from Vayu Naidu Company’s inaugural production South (2002), directed by Chris Banfield.
South is a visually stunning, cross-genre performance that brings together contemporary and South Indian (bharata natyam) dance performance.
Developed with jazz musician Orphy Robinson, South explores ‘the meaning of geographical direction,’ drawing on the experience of refugee communities in coastal locations in the South East of England, where Vayu is based, Cornwall, Chennai, South Africa, and Greece.
Richly cross-cultural and combining diverse contemporary and traditional practices, Vayu’s work explores and articulates the presence of the narrative storyteller, transposing RASA, ‘the essence of performance,’ toward the creation of performer presence.
In her workshop practice, Vayu works to focus RASA, taking ‘a journey through the nine principal human emotions that give an impulse to movement and then to story.’
Vayu’s research on performance storytelling was the basis of a prestigious Arts and Humanities Research Council Research Fellowship in the Creative Arts at the University of Kent, UK, from 2001-2004.
Vayu Naidu Company’s current performance is Nothing but the Salt, created by Vayu in collaboration with Judith Wier and directed by Chris Banfield.
The Company’s website is at http://www.vayunaiducompany.org.uk/
Images courtesy Vayu Naidu Company.
Early in the New Year we will begin documenting Paul Sermon’s development of a new commission for the opening of THEpUBLIC museum in West Bromwich, UK http://www.thepublic.com/.
Telematic Embrace will be a permanent installation in place from August 2006.
These images from Paul’s prospectus for the project are from Telematic Vision (1992), which inspires this new work.
Paul’s site-specific installations employ telematics to explore mutual interaction and user-determined narrative between remote participants.
Participants interact with others in physically dispersed sites by observing their own ‘human avatar’ representations in a telepresent space.
Paul describes how this is enabled:
Through the use of live chroma-keying and videoconferencing technology these divided audience participants enter a video installation and initially suppose they entering a passive space - sitting, standing or sometimes lying within it. Their presence within the space is recorded live on video camera and mapped in real-time, via a chroma-key video mixer, with an identical camera view of another participant in an identical installation space – combining two shots of live action by replacing a blue or green back drop in one image with the image of the other. The two spaces which can be any geographical distance apart are linked via a videoconference connection, making it possible to link and combine these telematic installations and their performing audiences between almost any location in the world.
These installations provoke an uncanny sense of presence in conflations between proximity and distance, intimacy and removal.
Paul argues that:
All technology is a development of language - a means of construction and interpretation of an environment. The definition of the virtual and real are all part of the same linguistic construct. Technology/language is not an apparatus or attachment of the body, but rather an extension of it.
For the user, remote participants come closer in a sense of presence divided between sites, actions and interactions.
Paul’s website is at http://www.paulsermon.org/
A context for this documentation of Paul’s work is already being developed on the Collaboratory at http://presence.stanford.edu:3455/PaulSermon/Home
Images courtesy Paul Sermon.
Tim Etchells will conduct one of our first Presence performance workshops – to be hosted by the Centre for Intermedia, Exeter, on 15 February.
Tim is Artistic Director of Forced Entertainment, one of the UK’s most influential companies working across performance, installation and media.
Forced Entertainment is currently presenting two theatre pieces, Exquisite Pain and Bloody Mess, at the Riverside Studios in London.
Exquisite Pain is pared down re-telling of conceptual artist Sophie Calle’s stories, an exploration ‘how the forces of language, memory and forgetting move to contain, preserve or erase events, how as a person one comes to terms with trauma’:
I decided to continue... until I had got over my pain by comparing it with other people's, or had worn out my own story through sheer repetition.
This is the first time the company have chosen to perform a text they have not created themselves.
Tim notes:
I loved the project's form of repeated exchange. Its "I'll tell you my sad story if you tell me yours". It's the kind of simple transaction that most of us have taken part in informally - in bars, cars or bedrooms - but in Calle's hands, as she repeatedly exchanges her own story of failed romance for the stories of friends, acquaintances and strangers, the process is reduced to its mathematical and psychological essence; a ticking tit-for-tat of death, lost love, existential despair and bad dentistry.
Two people sit in front of you and make their way through a collection of sad stories that belong to other people. A kind of bearing witness, a trip through the archive that Sophie Calle has collected, and a journey through her journey of remembering and trying to forget.
Bloody Mess is in many ways the antithesis of Exquisite Pain.
A highly physical spectacle involving ten performers ‘about the pleasure of watching, and about visual pleasure, physical pleasure,’ Bloody Mess emphasizes action, disorder and simultaneity.
Forced Entertainment’s work emphasizes the constructed nature of role, identity, and place.
Reflecting their concerns with media and mediation, the company frequently heighten the artificiality of the elements they play through, allowing one ‘fictional’ moment to shift onto or be juxtaposed with another.
Tim has suggested that such strategies foreground ‘the inability of the performers to fully inhabit the texts and gestures which they perform,’ reflecting the notion that:
The space that we really live in is a kind of electronically mediated one. And it feels like one’s landscape - the source of one’s images, the things that haunt you - are likely to be second, third, fourth-hand.
Yet in these ‘shifts,’ the vulnerabilities of the performers are revealed in counterpoint to the fictional ‘borrowings’ that make up the work.
Forced Entertainment pose questions about the performance of presence where mediation itself reveals the complexity of the ‘live’ act and event.
We will soon be developing Collaboratory project pages on Tim's work and Forced Entertainment in preparation for the workshop documentation.
Forced Entertainment’s website is at www.forcedentertainment.com/
Photos: Hugo Glendinning, courtesy of Forced Entertainment
|