Pearson/Brookes Presence Workshop at Exeter
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.