After a warm week in Prague... de volta a labuta.

The garden has changed again. This time we were away for two weeks and the plants already changed, there was hardly any leaves in the ground... it all changes so fast, it is hard to predict what will be alive or dead in September. Hard to know what colours to expect, what smells and noises.

The time spent there today was very productive. We have decided a shape and what will be needed for the scratch. It was interesting to work there after me and Lizzy took some time on our own researches, to think of our own singularities, plans and ideals. The exchange of ideas seemed fresh, we are changing constantly, like the garden, and it seems like we had this time for undserstanding the changes and constructing with them.

For the next two weeks we will not be able to rehearse there... then, the scratch. But today was a good day. Even though there is much hard work ahead, everything seems to be coming together, and not even the Wimbledon Forthnight with Southside vacations will get on our way!!

And the garden will keep transforming.

Yesterday in the garden

We walked up the hill, Lizzy, Jordan and me, carrying loads of equipment to test out some of the ideas and to have a tutorial. It was great! It is completely different to talk of a place being there, to talk of a site especific performance in the space where it will be performed. And also, to have a fresh eye onto things, the ideas as well as the place. I feel like I have been absorbed by its green, its bushes and flowers already.

Jordan had some good ideas as to how to make the audience move more freely through the space, or at least ways for them not to feel like they have to follow one thing or another. We talked a lot about actions, small visual performances of repetitive actions happening in the space, dispersing the attention from our circular event that could become a promenade. We also talked of visual interferences in the space, of playing and interacting with the garden elements but in other sittuations creating surprises, not fighting the garden but allowing something that would not normally be there to do so.

We talked a lot about sound interferences in the space. It was something that me and Lizzy had been considering. Among the equipment we carried we had a CD player, for sound testing, which did not work.... no comments. We also took a projector and that worked quite nicely, but not in the bushes as I had expected. Within walls... where we wanted but somewhat different. This, I believe, will be the key to our process, adaptation. Adaptation to the enviroment, to the facilities and to changes, and we have to work with it, not against it.


....


After the garden

Yesterday, as we discussed our ideas, Lizzy asked me a something which she was trying to define herself, in her own work. She asked: if I was to reduce the concerns of my research to one greater question. One that must contain all the other preocupations, what would it be. It is hard for me to find objectivity but it is an important step and a very good exercise. And I did.

Question:
How do text based performances play with verbal language as more than just the medium for creating content but the final creation in itself? In other words, how can they draw awareness to the materiality of text as the formal element which hits, touches or weighs upon the audience, transcending the image that it builds, even when the opposite might, at points, have seem to have happened?

To answer this greater question other questions need to be answered, questions such as: what is the materiality of language? As I work on my dissertation these points are all under construction. But I leave a quote, a thought that inspires me and in a poetic way helps me go forward even when it seems hard, or when I am tired. This came first, the aesthetics came later. This is again by Alfredo Bosi:

"A zen teacher adviced a painter to become the the bamboo he wished to paint. Art should, to the best of its habilities, erase the difference, leap the interval that sepparates body from nature. It is precisely what the hand does: connects to the surface of matter or penetrates it in order to transform it, in order to compress the distance between what nature is and that which men want it to be. The hands abide to a constant impulse of the individual to convert the object to his own and dynamic substance. The hands submit, as best as they can, the world to men’s purposes. And they do it easily, graciously, because they are contiguous to things: solid touching solid, skin against skin, matter juxtaposed to matter.

Voice is not manifested in such ways. It acts frequently at a distance or in the object’s absense. It’s being, that cannot be seen, does not move anything directly, it replaces it, evokes it, induces things into dancing with other things, carries them rapidly from the world of image to that of concept and back, through rhythym and melody, to a state of pure sensation."

(translated to the best of my habilities by me)