The Presence Project

The Presence Project Collaboratory now incorporates more than a dozen extensive discussions with contributing artists now available through the Collaboratory, including:

Marianne Weems http://presence.stanford.edu:3455/Collaboratory/831

Mike Pearson and Mike Brookes http://presence.stanford.edu:3455/Collaboratory/1120

Fiona Templeton http://presence.stanford.edu:3455/Collaboratory/1101

Phillip Zarrilli http://presence.stanford.edu:3455/Collaboratory/1143

A full directory of these discussions of presence, performance and visual art is available at our Presence research grouping, available on the Collaboratory at http://presence.stanford.edu:3455/Collaboratory/493

Our most recent posted discussion is with Tim Etchells:

I don’t know if there is such a thing as simply ‘being there,’ just being present. Being present is always a kind of construction. Perhaps we could think of presence as something that happens when one attempts to do something, and whilst attempting to do that thing you become visible; visible in not quite succeeding in doing it, visible through the cracks or the gaps. (Tim Etchells, Presence Project Interview)

Our interview with Tim is now avaliable online through the Collaboratory at http://presence.stanford.edu:3455/Collaboratory/646

Recorded by Gabriella Giannachi and Nick Kaye following Tim's Presence Project workshop, 'Presence and Absence Intertwined,' our discussion ranges over Forced Entertainment's live performance, digital and installation work, as well as the company's collaborations with the photographer Hugo Glendinning.

Throughout, Tim considers the constructions of performer presence that animate the company's work, as well as the work of other influential artists including The Wooster Group and Peter Handke.

courtesy Tim Etchells

Reflecting on the impact of new technologies on the construction and performance of presence, Tim notes:

One of the things we do as readers of signs and situations - and of all things - is that we respond to absences - and we fill absence. So, you know, the way the telephone makes us imagine the whole person, the way that in text chatting - instant messaging - in writing, you sort of spend time with other people but you are not in the same room as them. And because it’s purely in that sense, because it’s purely language, there is a huge role for you in mentally unpacking what’s written or, in the phone, unpacking what’s said, to create people.

As we look forward toward beginning year 3 of the project, we will be significantly extending the Collaboratory resource, incorporating video documentation, publishing a wide range of interviews and significantly developing our core investigations.

We welcome contributions and enquiries - details of contributing to the Presence Project Forum are at http://presence.stanford.edu:3455/Collaboratory/1095

Posted by Nick Kaye at 3:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

On 24 May, 12.30-4.30, Fiona Templeton will present the fifth of our Presence Research Workshops here at Exeter.

Fiona Templeton, YOU - The City (1988), Greg Archinega
photo: Zoe Beloff

Fiona's workshop will focus on Audience Interaction.

She writes:

Theatre that interacts with the audience must consider the audience themselves as an area of skill to be developed. This has become far more sophisticated than notions of "audience participation" which risked (or played with) the audience's discomfort. Technological "interaction" is now familiar, but live interaction functions differently to the machine. The audience's part in an interaction can not wholly be surmised, and specific research is needed if interaction is to become more refined, responsive and complex. The inclusion of audiences in the development of the work from the beginning, therefore, is, I hope, not only an "opportunity to take part" but an opportunity to shape and have ownership of arts experiences. In the Afterword to my book YOU-The City I wrote "Theatre is the art of relationship." So research into the relationship of a specific work to its audience is also for me work on a model for further relationships between the art and its public.

Fiona's work ranges widely across many disciplines. She has been awarded fellowships from the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts in both Poetry and Visual Arts (new genres); an ''Abendzeitung Muenchen Sterne des Jahres'' for theatre; and two fellowships from New York Foundation for the Arts for performance, as well as one for playwriting. She was 1996-7 Senior writer-in-residence at the English Faculty of Cambridge University, England, and 2000-2003 Arts and Humanities Research Board fellow with the Department of Theatre Studies, University of Lancaster, England. In December 2002 she received the annual Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts grant for theatre in New York.

Her award-winning and influential YOU--The City, "an intimate citywide play for an audience of one", has since been recreated in six countries and languages, including at the London International Festival of Theatre in 1989, and most recently as a key project of Rotterdam Cultural Capital of Europe 2001.

Recognition (1996).
Images: Fiona Templeton.

Long-term, she is writing a project for multiple directors, Realities, consisting of 5 interrelated plays. Her work created in collaboration with the late Michael Rotamski, Recognition, the first of these pieces, was produced at the Kitchen, New York, the ICA, London, and the Cambridge Conference on Contemporary Poetry 1996-7. The second work, Borders, was written for Gledalisce Glej, Ljubljana, Slovenia. The third , The Medead, is in progress. It is a play that retells the whole life-story of Medea, for 10 performers, to be produced by the Glasgow Tramway and the Rotterdamse Schouwburg, and has involved research into the origins of the Medea figure in what is now the Republic of Georgia.

Audience places for the workshop are free. The workshop will take place in Theatre Studio 2, in Drama's new complex, The Alexander Building, Thornlea, University of Exeter. Details of how to find us are here http://www.projects.ex.ac.uk/performing-presence/How%20to%20find%20us.php

To book an audience place at the workshop please contact l.m.dowsett@exeter.ac.uk

A fuller discussion of Fiona's work is available through the Collaboratory at http://presence.stanford.edu:3455/Collaboratory/352

Fiona's website is at http://www.fionatempleton.org/

Images reproduced courtesy Fiona Templeton.

Future Presence workshops will be conducted by:

Bella Merlin (21 June)

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