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)

Tim Etchells’ Presence Workshop will take place on 15 February 12.30-4.30, in Drama’s newly opened Theatre Studios at Thornlea, University of Exeter.

All our workshops are free and open to a public audience. To reserve an audience place please e-mail: l.m.dowsett@exeter.ac.uk

Photo courtesy Tim Etchells

The workshop will be divided into two parts. In the first Tim will lead a small group of students in a series of practical exercises. Based on simple rules and performance tasks these will provide a starting point for discussion about how we construct our own presence and that of others and how rules, situations, space and language itself function as the frames through and in which we appear.

The second part of the session will be more in the form of lecture-demonstration. Tim will use examples from his own practice and that of other artists to expand on the ideas begun in part one, continuing to focus on the ways that limits, frames around and confusions to presence are a key part of its manifestation.

Forced Entertainment, Exquisite Pain (2005)
Photo Hugo Glendinning, courtesy Forced Entertainment.

Tim is best known for his work as artistic director and writer of the performance ensemble Forced Entertainment, based in Sheffield UK and working together since 1984. He has also created diverse projects of his own in a variety of media including SMS, video and installation.

Forced Entertainment, Exquisite Pain (2005)
Photo Hugo Glendinning, courtesy Forced Entertainment.

He has collaborated with other artists in many disciplines including the photographer Hugo Glendinning, the choreographer Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods and visual artists Vlatka Horvat, Franko B and Asta Groting. Under his direction, Forced Entertainment have toured widely in mainland Europe and beyond and have made projects that span theatre, durational performance, and other media. Recent Forced Entertainment projects include 'Bloody Mess' a darkly comical rocktacular collage, 'First Night', a disastrous vaudeville and 'Who Can Sing A Song To Unfrighten Me?', a performance of 24 hours duration.

Tim has written widely about performance and contemporary culture, and has published three books: 'The Dream Dictionary' (Duckworth 2001); 'Endland Stories', (Pulp Books 1999); and 'Certain Fragments' - a collection of theoretical writing and performance texts (Routledge 1999).

Tim is currently a Creative Research Fellow in the Department of Theatre Studies, Lancaster University.

Full details of the Performing Presence workshop series are available at http://www.projects.ex.ac.uk/performing-presence/events.php

Forced Entertainment’s website is at http://www.forcedentertainment.com

Gabriella Giannachi’s notes on Tim Etchells and Forced Entertainment are on the Collaboratory at: http://presence.stanford.edu:3455/Collaboratory/306

See also our previous weblog entry http://traumwerk.stanford.edu/presence/2005/11/tim_etchells_presence_workshop_1.html

Future workshops in the series will be conducted by:

Mike Pearson and Mike Brookes: 8 March
Vayu Naidu: 22 March
Phillip Zarrilli and Klaus Seewald (date tbc)
Fiona Templeton (date tbc)
Bella Merlin: 21st June

More to come….

Posted by Nick Kaye at 7:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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

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