b e t w e e n _ t h o u g h t s

2010-06-22T17:42:00.004-03:00

a video from a walk between 2007

This is a video I made for the performance A Walk Between. Lizzy and I collected texts from many authors, from our own writings and used fragments to bring this dancing text to life, a moving constellation of letters.

2010-06-22T11:14:00.004-03:00

back again two years later

Has it been that long?? It certainly does not feel like it. Ok the last attempt did not work out. Now I am back again. Something about june.... it must be.

I have not been here for a while but lots have happened somewhere else: www.underconstructiontheatre.com

I will try again. Words.

2008-06-13T02:00:00.000-03:00

acts for acting, words for describing acting

After a long pause, this is an attempt to reactivate this blog, put forward some new ideas and rethink the old ones. This will be again a place for reflecting and hopefully sharing with all the friends that are now so far away.

I have been thinking lately of many ideas that could become performances and ways to push forward the research I started in my MA concerning text and performance. I have been thinking of a dance that takes place only in the mental space, and only through words. How can words replace action? What if there is a whole act where absolutely nothing happens except within each person who is hearing, and then it would happen to each person differently. Can a dance, described with the same words, be a hundred times different?

Words weighing as images determining movement through the rhythm in which they are delivered.

How about if then I keep describing and the movement is something completely different or just the opposite. What would the audience really see?

2007-08-30T22:26:00.000-03:00

seeing

We have now been rehearsing with a director for a while. This is someone we looked for to help us with rehearsals, characters and structures. It is funny and wonderful the way these rehearsals and this relationship has developed. At first all ideas were fixed from the scratch, what worked and what had to be transformed and developed, and there was great resistence to any new ideas that Rob brought in. However, (now I see the beauty of it) there is so much in theatre that I had not considered. As we bring the structure together I start realizing where the difference lies between the "theatrical" performance and the "artistic" performance. I start suddenly noticing how the audience differs in each, how the engagement, structure, narrative and need for conducting are completly different. I have not yet defined where my interest lies. May be it is not purely in one side. May be I want to explore the borderline between these two manifestations of the same and not so the same art. For now I am learning theatre, learning through developing structures that will allow it to happen, as theatre. And then.... all to come will shine under a different, entirely new light.

- sprouts of thought in the late hours of the night or early hours of the morning -

2007-08-04T20:49:00.000-03:00

enhancing the narrative and drawing attention to the central question

After two weeks break from practice, focusing only in research, I look back upon the scratch with the advantage of time, the illuminating distance from the event.

The immediate days that preceded the scratch were a time of fear. A time of insecurity. The edge of time for exposing ideas, which before inhabited the space of words and existed only in the mind. At this time the work was mine, only mine and Lizzy's. But concepts had to become physical, they had to be seen and to be public, this was the hardest step. At this time there was a fear of not being understood, of speaking and not being heard, of discovering that all the work when put together did not make sense.

But it did. I was pleased with the result. All the parts were put together and the event happened. The actors were present, I felt present and the audience were too. There was a moment of exchange and the presence of all things together justified us being there. I believe we worked with the right amount of elements, many elements to create the dynamic of the piece. It seemed to me visually strong, eventhough, there are many things to be ellaborated and transformed. It was good to see through the scratch those things the worked and those that didn't.

However,there are, in my view, two main important things to be explored further, visually and through spoken text; ideas that inhabited our minds but hardly showed. First thing is the narrative, exposing the stories of the house and developing characters; creating tension. We are working site specific in an ambience rich with ghosts and stories that need to be ressucitated. Second is our central question. We need to find means of questioning the audience's notions of space and time transforming it. We need to hint these questions which are so present in Calvino.

In order to enhance the narrative we have been thinking of using the peripheral actions, the characters that are spread around the garden to make reference to our main character and her story. As if they were pages of a book that one by one give away, but visually, parts of her life and hints of her relationships. The connection between the traveller and the garden character should be implicit in the travellers stories and in the clashing of time.

The concerns with the concepts of outside, inside and transforming experiences should be present through new visual elements and in this cyclic text that fills the garden.

Finally, if this is to be a durational performance we have to think of ways of making it dynamic, repetitive but dynamic. This will also have to be developed for the actions and for the rest. We are thinking of it.....

more to come later!!!

2007-06-20T19:51:00.000-03:00

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.

2007-06-07T12:53:00.000-03:00

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)

2007-05-31T20:33:00.000-03:00

second post of the day - yesterday in the garden

Yesterday at the garden I took some time to play with very simple short words. Trying to integrate them into the space. Thinking of different ways to bring written text into the space, creating a dialogue between the inside and the ideas. The attempt was to use the existing garden material in order to create these transitory shapes for a garden that cannot be permanently modified. My main concern now is the constant transformation of the seasons and how much intervention can be planned now. Will the leaves still be on the floor a few months from now? Will the pond still be dense green? How will the garden's inherent narrative change as the colours and foliage change?

2007-05-31T20:23:00.000-03:00

what is it that interests me about text - aspirations

It is not the creation of an elaborate complicated text which will demand extreme attention of its listeners. It is not the development of a narrative. It is the game of time, the transformation and encounter of times within the poetic language. It is the rearrangement of the real enabled by discourse. It is the medium of words as tools for expressing the invisible and connecting us to what is absent. It is the parallel world which exists through words, transforming concepts into sensations. It is to create a circular text which exists within itself, like a dance, within its movements; a linear text that articulates with the exterior, that speaks of something outside its boundaries and yet transcends it. An arrangement of sounds, when sounds, or an arrangement of forms, that refers more to itself than to anything else, reminding the espectator of the subtleties of language, of poetry, of images that exist primarily through words. The espectators should feel this existence. I want “sound and all its echos to make the concrete surface of the poem dense.” And to remind the audience that “if in the end of the passage image seems to have exceeded discourse, this overcome was also true in the opposite sense: in order to reach the completion of the image, it was necessary to unfasten a chain of words.” *

I intend to create a performance determined by the deliverance of verbal text and in its creations, however, this should be done in a way that sequence is not important, that fragments overcome the whole. A circular storytelling which escapes from beginings and ends, losing itself in repetitions.

* the quotes are extracts from Alfredo Bosi's O Tempo e o Ser da Poesia, translated from Portuguese to the best of my habilities.

2007-05-24T13:32:00.000-03:00

the audience

We have been discussing our intentions. We have been posting our research ideas. We have been ellaborating what we want to express. It is subjective and it will be still once we have established what the audience should perceive and consider. Inevitably we are individuals making work that we would like to see. That we want to give birth to. However, even if this question, when answered, remains somewhat in a subjective level, it must be asked, for it will determine our choices. If I could I would give all my favourite poetryfor each person I love to read, and yet would it make sense for that or would it be just too much, too diverse, may be each project is the choice of one poetry, one intention, one author...

Lizzy and I have had many ideas, beautiful ideas, visual and conceptual, however, in order to examine their relevance we must know what we want our audience to experience. I would answer this question by writing that they should experience what we experienced when we read The Invisible Cities. Our experience is the core of our choice to use this book. As I see it, we chose this book because it reflected in some way our relationship of foreigner and native, our exchange of experience, but most of all because it questions how much of the present is real, how much it is modified by past experiences; it questions how much of one place can be modified by the outside (the surroundings) and how our perception of the other place changes as we share it through thoughts, through words, from the present space.

I would like the audience to walk through the garden and consider what is present in that space, what has been seen on the way there and in which way these experiences change their experience of the garden as well as, once they leave, how much of the garden will affect their journey back home, or wherever they go. I believe what we want the audience to experience is contained in a conversation that Kublai Kahn and Marco Polo have in the garden. That conversation is the starting point and it will be given to our audience. The duality of inside the garden and everywhere else, all that is not in that present space, is what they should consider as they walk through bushes, under trees and hear of journeys to foreign land. This should also be experienced through a character which is present everywhere but which in reality, is never physically there.

2007-05-22T19:05:00.000-03:00

One character is poetry immersed and represented through poetry. And the garden, her garden, keeps her poetry and changes through this poetry. She attempts to change the garden, the garden changes her. The other character, the traveller, is the storyteller. She speaks of places she has been and people she has seen. The references are in the garden but she hardly speaks of it. There is a narrative in the story, actually five narratives, cyclic stories that never come to an end. The importance of the stories is not the stories in itself but the event of joining people, of telling it, of listening, of the language and expressions used for presenting it.

Each story is cut by a meeting within the story, a meeting with another character's story that will then carry on without ever completing the first one. This is where the characters meet, it is not in the garden. It is not in space and time, but through their stories, connecting stories.

There is also someone who knows of plants, who knows of change. Someone who also knows why we are there, the purposes and events that led to this meeting. She is not a character but she also has a story to tell, a story of fragments, time and space. It is a piece of history given in an unexpected way. In a poetic way. She might take you by the hand and show something no one else will see, tell you a secret.

These are three of the essencial elements. Then, there is the garden. What can one say about the garden? What can we say about the garden in months to come? You have to go and see it!

2007-04-26T04:36:00.000-03:00

Sometimes it is hard to draw an argument for a research of language when all the tools available to do it are nothing but language itself. The attempt seems to generate a knot of selfreferencial discourse and as one tries to express a meaning, the meaning is nothing but the structure built, within it the ability to grab, draw and engage the reader. Again what comes to attention is the importance not strictly of a final meaning nor of a plot (in a practice sittuation), but of the sequence of words, the embroidery of sepparate meanings creating poetry or, if not poetry in the sense we define it, some body of the sort which exists and weighs upon us in itself, with no other purpose but its presence to be felt.

As I have defined it, I am researching language. I had known this for a while before writing but it was not until some weeks that I expressed it fully, put it into simple words. I am looking at how language (visual and verbal) can be used to create a performance, not through a predetermined script, but through a simultaneous development of language and performance, in order to communicate the subtleties and beauty of language in itself. The plot becomes of second importance as the discourse, its textures, rhythms and colours approaches, attacks or lie upon the audiences. The inttention is not to drop the plot, not to extinguish narrative, it is also using these that discourses are developed, in order to bring them to light, however language should not be the means, but like in poetry it should shine brighter.

I have been looking quite a lot at Becket, the way he works with language. Although, his plays are constructed from a very defined script with precise dialogues/monologues, and stage directions, it is language that counts the most. It weighs like a bag and has shape and presence as something squeezing or softening the audience. Phillip Glass, in a documentary of Einstein on the Beach, comments how the emotional high of the play always happens in a different moment as you repeatdly watch it. It is always a different experience altered by the audience's perception on each night. It is different from conventional scripts, where in the communication of plot is the most important, its heros, events and romances.

Finally, the devised performance opens up for change, as language and performance are constructed together, they are always shaping and reshaping each other. It becomes an always transforming piece.

2007-03-29T08:10:00.000-03:00

LAST WEEK

Centre for Drawing, Trinity Buoy Wharf, running, trains, trips, cold, tutorials, lighting workshops... all things that filled last week, all things that made it fly very fast and that allowed productive thoughts, moments (not all the time) and actions. Monday, tuesday, Trinity. The beggining of the week was for solving problems, for looking at our visuals and making decisions concerning the Interim show. The result was very pleasing, thanks to Lizzy, who could be there on the following days!!! There was a lot there, and it is true that we need to improve aour work with layers, make it more subtle, give more space to the audience, or take the opposite way out and fill them up, give them no space, not even to breath, so that among so much they need to carve, to work in order to see something. Or, just walk away. But the second option is not what we seek. The Interim show was a good opportunity for trying out ideas, for taking thoughts out of papers and air, an opportunity for transforming these conversations, so many discussions that me and Lizzy have been having, into work. Into images and sounds. Into meaning that means for others as well as for ourselves. Now we know that we need to dry it a little. We need to cut information and rearrange the layers, recreate the layers. And finally, ofcourse, bring the characters into the story.

Wednesday, Friday, Centre for Drawing. As I arrived in the Centre for Drawing on Tuesday evening Rich described to me their work, what had been going on for the past days, for the days I was at Trinity. He described to me something of the process, something of the play he was developing, and the mother character, the character I was to work on the next days. This character, which I will not describe here for it belongs to his project, then became mine for interpreting, for developing, for representing through text in the centre for drawing space. The work was productive. I brought texts which for me spoke of this character. They were myths, songs and fragments. Along with these I had some of Rich's play in transparency for the overhead projector. It was somewhat strange to develop the work I have been researching with a character so different from what me and Lizzy look for in our performance. It was strange to try and portray through text a character which is through the words of the play so dry, so real and unreal, so far from the poetry I have been looking into working. But it was a good experience to work around this "strangeness".

Ofcourse, the amount of time I had ahead of me for working, made me repetitive, it made my work go through those layers I have trouble with, and add, and add more, and still more, till my mother character was flooded with too many images and many of which could be cut down. It was not completly successful if considered as a final work. My text experiment did not yet become a character, it did not manage to point out a person, or to hint her attributes, but it brought to light the things that could work and the things that might be missing. In that sense it was very successful. I know now what I need to get rid of, what I need to collect, and from this I can start building the following character. The character that will exist in my performance with Lizzy. It was great to have Rich's and Jordan's feedbacks, as it is Rich's play and as I had my tutorial in the space. Rich brought some really good input also due to his theatre background.

As for the objects, I did work with them. I found it hard to work with projection over objects due to their attributes. But it was good to try and it is something I look into trying further. There is many things one has to think when using objects, reflexibility, size, shape, and so on. But the idea of interacting the imateriality of the projection with the materiality of the object should evolve into an interesting set of visuals and meanings.

2007-03-21T20:21:00.000-03:00

the importance of time

an image flashes into our eyes, it takes no more than one instant, one brief moment, a glimpse, and if it is an icon, it takes that long to make sense. Other images might involve a time for decoding, a second look for unravelling or even a pause for possessing it. However, even those, in the first glance are captured, the time that follows is then for a decodification.

verbal discourse is different. the time for text, read or spoken, demands a duration. It demands a time for the words to be delivered, for our eyes to make out the shapes or for our ears to unravell sounds. It demands a time for completing a sentence and for changing whatever has been absorbed with the next pieces of information. In his book "o ser e o tempo da poesia" (the being and the time of poetry), Alfredo Bosi compares the verbal discourse to dance, a sequence of gestures, where one whole gesture is only perceived once it has already passed and has, then, been followed by others. Whatever happens during the process is modified by what follows. Verbal discourse demands more than an image, it asks for those who experience it, patience and hope for what follows.

2007-02-26T18:22:00.000-03:00

My dad would say that we have moments of action and moments of stillness. He says we should learn to respect these moments sit back and observe... and during those times it is more productive to pause than to knock your head against the wall.

I have been reading, I have been writing and trying out visuals on my computer. I have been developing a performance and imagining how it can work. I have been trying to bring together the ideas of my research and performance. I have been looking at video poetry, at performance through Peter Brooks' "The Empty Space" and at actions through the use of studio spaces... I do not stop, but when I try to talk about it, it fades into the air. It does not go through.

Now, I am running away from graphic design practice. I do want to use it, but more as a reference, as something that I have within me as tool, but I do not want to go back into the pure, static words. If it was just this, I would not have come so far.

I want to look at text. I love poetry. I love words. I love the drawing of words, its symbols, its richness, its sound. And I want to use its sound. And I want to use it visually. And I want to give it another rhythm, which is not just the rhythm they have forever had on paper, on a page of a book, a static page of a book. Does it seem too much? It is not too much. It is looking at the materiality of the word, the deliverance of the word in space and adding onto it another materiality, a materiality it can gather from the context and the space it occupies. This is the focus of my research. How can words gain a new materiality in space, in a performance space. How can we use their values, their phisicality and add to it with the other means that performance, projection and the 3D space allow.

In the performance I want to look into giving life to these words. Into giving it a new rhythm that can interact with an actor. Not just as a background to help or contradict the narrative. Not as the thoughts of a character projected on a screen as he goes on with his thing. I want it to be the actual character. That the words may interact with another character, who in his turn will deliver lines and actions. I want the poetry that builds a character to come through through words that have no spokesman. Typographic poems in place of the actor.

When referring Melo e Castro's Video poems Eduardo Kats writes (please forgive any translation problems).
"The Central focus of Video-poetry is the time and its multiple forms of manipulation, like the retention by the memory, the duration, the brief permanence, the abrupt cut, the compression, the acceleration, the interuption, the slow passing, and so many other forms that, connected to sintetic colours, electronic sounds, oscillators, and other equipment, establish new parameters for the poetic art."

2007-02-11T09:56:00.000-02:00

INVISIBLE

the idea of using calvino for a performance is the ground, the first important element. The book should be the first level of the building, the first and essencial piece torwards the development of a performance. The reason for Calvino is the play with words, his writing, that always takes us somewhere else but always reminds us of the vehicle: letters, words, symbols, reading. Another reason is the invisible, the way he manages to grab what cannot be seen, his exploration of the senses and usage of metaphors to convey images of places, atmospheres and relationships. He works on simple or sometimes complex descriptions, which always evoke and reveal a variety of extremely deep and significant relationships. His writing is a web of beautiful words illuminating beatiful and often sad images.

Since the idea is not to use Calvino's text directly on the performance, maybe fragments of it, but to explore the ideas in it without tying our study to the text I have been trying to grasp the invisible of places. To write about those things we sense but cannot be seen, things which can only be seen through our minds eyes. This practice also gives me the possibility to play with language. For example, is it possible to make a mental picture of a foreign place through a list of things that inhabit it, but listed in its own language, so that sounds particualr to the place should fill the space and invade the audience's senses?

LANGUAGE

Now my study has shifted in a very positive way. I am looking at verbal language in performance. Language interacting with images, words creating image, the interaction of languages, words invading the senses and fooling reason. I am seeking for different ways of exploring verbal language in performance. How does it start? How to use a text, build something from a text and deconstruct, copy and paste words and images. Like in the waves, breaking it all apart, images, texts, scales, all into fragments... what else can be done with these elements? How far can we go?

"araras vermelhas e jandaias... era o papagaio trobeta era o papagaio curraleiro era o periquito cutapado era o xarã o peito roxo o ajuru curau o ajuru curica arari ararica araraúna araraí araguaí arara-taua maracanã maitaca arara-piranga catorra teriba camiranga anaca anapura canindés tuins periquitos...."
- Macunaíma, Mario de Andrade

2007-02-04T16:38:00.000-02:00

On the road again, this time, I hope, in the right way.

If my work this year could be described as an object I would say it is a pendulum. In the begining it was a fixed idea of using poetry and image in translation, translating words, experimenting the usage of a different language to build the same images, the same multiple images contained in one word through visuals, through colours and shapes. Then in an attempt to find something new, different from my old work I came close to abandon the images which were not contained within the variety of textual elements. For a while it was all about reinforcing the visuals of graphic text and pointing at the rich surface of the verbal language... and this shift marked my difficulty in finding a focus, so I was thrown by questions into extreme and different directions.
Now,
I hope to have settled in the middle, basing my research on the usage of language in performance. The use of verbal language as a tool and how it can interact with images to be yet more powerful. I am not abandoning any of my previous questions, in my research I intend to embrace them.

For my final performance I have been thinking of bringing out the invisible. To express, through the use of language, places not as they are seen but for what they communicate through the smells, the movement of people, the links between them, the beliefs of those who inhabit the place. The idea of capturing the invisible manifestation of a place and translating it into words and images is the starting point of the final performance, it is as the first note to a music, from where all rhythm, texture and sequence of sounds will derive, and it is based in the invisible cities. The final performance will be an encounter and through this encounter I hope to let my reserch questions flow, find their forms and shapes and spill onto the audience as a river would.

2007-01-30T16:03:00.000-02:00

long time since I have last been here....

It is words I seek, it is the raw material of words, naked words, words which expose themselves as their own final product but they always point out some other way. I seek not to deny this presence each word carries along themselves. No! I want the words to exhibit all their riches, all their sounds and the sound of what it seems to carry. But I want the word to be truthful, to reveal that it does not carry anything except their own form and texture, what they refer to is beyond them, it is within us and in what we see. But the words are just an arrow, not even a representation, not even a trace, they are the tools to start our memory, to entertain our imagination... and in their bare, simple composition, they are beautiful. Abstract drawings for conventions.

However I have used so many words to refer to this project lately that it wants to escape now. No more words for descriptions and studies and reflections and explorations, they are all ink on paper right now... on this day the screen will not see nor reflect them. Too many words have been written already.

2007-01-18T15:51:00.000-02:00

b e t w e e n l i n e s a n d a i r
words image and space

“At the moment when I concentrate and reflect, I find myself again, always, in this garden, at this hour of the evening, in your august presence, though I continue, without a moment’s pause, moving up a river green with crocodiles or counting the barrels of salted fish being lowered into the hold”
Italo Calvino, The Invisible Cities

A person who loves poetry and has read Fernando Pessoa might know Portugal without ever phisically being there. Their eyes know it through words and sounds which were once the poet’s. Once familiar with it, they might see bits and pieces of Portugal in their own space, in their own paths. They own the experience of visiting a foreign country although they might never leave their own. Not long ago I read The Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. Not long ago I went on a long trip with Marco Polo without leaving one room, just as he might travel to distant unknown lands never moving from one garden, describing one city as if it were many, one after another. The selected words used by Marco Polo to fill the garden and amuse Kublai Khan are a gathering of symbols which transform the space. And even when the words are Italo Calvino’s as a narrator they are just words which allow some greater change to occur whithin the space of the reader.
Words, however, being just the elements of a much more complex system, which is verbal communication can be transformed through the way they are spoken, written or the context in which they appear. Words in Fiona Tan’s “The Changeling” were spoken through a warm motherly voice which invited the viewer to spend a long time looking at still pictures on a wall as if they were familiar from ancient times. She challenges the white space of a gallery and transforms it into a confortable space for meditation as she says:

“My text sets out a tentative line like a drawing. Carefully negotiating the space in-between the words, feeling out the contours of the character. This slight smile, this reluctant chin. I would like with words to create the image, to make it visible. And when that succeeds my voice will sink into the image; word and image entwined and impossible to disentangle.”

She talks of drawing with words of transforming the own phisicality of the words into objects of communication. She talks of using the words as a whole in all its possibilities. Words are graphic symbols, they occupy space and through their forms and usage they can create meaning different from that which has been established by convention, that which we find in the dictionary. As we think of these possibilities we are establishing two different aspects of the same verbal language. There is the abstract conventional meaning, or further even, the possibility of building a descriptive or reflective argument which we understand by our knowledge of what words signify and the physical aspect which is the characters, the space between them, the way they are arranged or delivered in space, those are the signifiers.
Through the reading of The Invisible Cities we interact with the words in their first aspect. In the discourse we encounter sets of meanings which lead us into building our own mental images. The same occurs with Bachelard in the The Poetics of Space, although in this second case, he departs from images which are already familiar to us and develops it through his own understanding of physical spaces. This second example is interesting for Bachelard analyses different spaces and the way they have been perceived by other authors, the way many different authors have used text and language to communicate sensations of being within a certain space, their choices of verbal images to create sensorial experiences for the reader.
The words in this case can be used to describe in a very simple way and allow the reader to create images in very simple ways, however, it can also reflect upon the same first description, or with the minimum elements of description, allow the reader to wonder and create very complex, diverse and ellaborate images, such as poetry does. Roland Barthes, in his book Camera Lucida, when analysing photography and its representations writes:

“... contrary to the text which, by the sudden action of a single word, can shift a sentence from description to reflection...”

The second aspect, words as visual material, has been used not only by poets, but by many artists, through videos, sound recordings, neon, paintings and so on. Ofcourse this second usage of the words does not deny the first in any way, it uses the conventional meaning of the text in order to emphasize a visual idea, or uses the visual idea in order to emphasize its conventional meaning. Fionna Tan recreated the white impersonal gallery room through her narrating of soothing words about herself and the others, Bruce Nauman filled up the Turbine Hall with sounds and words creating a sense of confusion in an actually vast empty space in his Raw Materials, Sonia Lins, a Brazilian Artist, created various spaces and transformed them through writings, as she did in Zumbigos, with handwriting occupying a cavernous space which ressembled the insides of a body, and so many others have explored these visual aspects of verbal language.
Verbal discourse can therefore transform space through the creation of new images for the viewer and by actually visually interfering in space through its material presence. However, how much is it able to affect the space around it? What other artifices can be used in establishing the text’s presence within the space? How can it interact with all the images that might exist on its surroundings? In performances there is commonly the use of text in order to establish a narrative or a context, especially in theatre. Is this text affecting the space around it?
In The Poetics of Space, Bachelard refers to one of Baudelaire’s text in which he describes a quiet and confortable house by opposing its image to the winter outside. Bachelard underlines all the words used by the author to suggest the feeling of confort within the house, and as the reader uncovers this passage he can sense the feeling of being in this place, which he makes his own as if momentarily being there, this experience than changes the way he feels about the space he physically occupies. We could question ourselves how would image be able to evoke the same atmosphere without the use of adjectives and the nouns which through words become as personal as the reader’s dearest memories.
Finally, in a performance the words interact with images and movement. These words can be used to enphasize or call attention to a certain action that is taking place, at the same time the words could deny all that the audience can visually perceive, they could add irony to a piece and reveal themselves in many different ways. This has been done in arts for a long time. Just as René Magritte painted a pipe and wrote beneath it “this is not a pipe” so have many other artists worked with the ways image and text can interact.
This project is an attempt to look at what various artists and philosophers have experimented and written about the interaction of words with images, the phisicality of language and the changes in perception through text and then link it with the study of performance and more especifically the usage of text in performatic arts and theatre. This project is an attempt to understand how the use of verbal language can transform the space in which it appears.

2006-12-23T20:43:00.000-02:00

I would like to capture one moment and make it music. Fill the whole space and transform it as music does.
As deep as music goes and as far.
And yet it seems impossible to do music without music.
Music as a state of mind, as an impulse for extreme sensations.
May be poetry is the art that goes closest... may be... the usage of poetry...

2006-12-20T18:24:00.000-02:00

Some weeks passed as if a long time, longer than just a few weeks, had separated the begining of this group project from its outcome. Some weeks which were marked in the begining by getting to know each other, being careful of words and actions, lots of thinking and discussing of many and different ideas, and by the end were lived through to the point of long hours of group work, building sets, videos, costumes and most of the time joyful conversations and laughter.
All of this summed up to 30 minutes on stage. 30 minutes of what seemed like an interested crowd being led through the theatre to see our piece on Roland Barthes. After 30 minutes, after exhibiting the work it was all destroyed and trashed.... seems like a good therapy. Zen work.
The process was the most important, more important than the short 30 minutes. Not due to the time it took but due to the learning and the exchange of ideas. It is true that we, as a group, did not cross the line of intimacy needed for someone to stand up and claim for order, or simply make decisions fast. We were usually too careful of each other (but I do not think in such a short time things could have happened differently). The learning through the exchange of ideas as well as the building of the space were the most important things (and by the building of the space I mean everything within it: puppets, costumes, sound and videos).
As for the performance I could not see much. Most of the time we were backstage or had our backs to the audience. At one point, however, as I turned around for the puppet handling I saw things had not gone exactly as we had planned. There were people every where. They were not in the back as we had imagined. Was that a problem? I thought it would be, for I wandered how much they could see, where would they look at with so many things going on. Talking to pelople afterwards though it did not seem to have bothered them and most people seemed to have enjoyed it. Through my enquiring I could not find out if they had actually understood the narrative!

Now it will be strange to go back to our own personal project. To our spaces within the studios and to the way time had passed before.

2006-12-05T20:09:00.001-02:00

Group work
Today the whole group was working very hard.
Today was a day of accomplishments since everything seemed to be moving on the same pace and everyone was doing it together. In groups, smaller groups, but today it felt like something was happening groupwise in a new and very good wavelength. It was a tiring but very, extremely fulfilling day!

2006-12-01T13:27:00.000-02:00

WAVES
The waves is an incredible performance!!! Two hours and a half of thrill.
Wonderful use of text:
The way the text is read directly from the book makes its presence stronger. The presence of the words as they were written as Virginia Woolf intended for it to be read and one almost forgets the editing done for the play. The way it is read is dynamic, with one narrator speaking in a very propper English and actors reading for each different character a different voice.
Details:
The fragmentation which happens in space makes every detail, and the perception of details by each of our senses (hearing and seeing especially) very vivid. It is impressive the care given to detail. Once all these fragmented elements are brought together on the screen, through live filming which magnifies actions on the stage almost taking them out of context, it is as if one was watching a movie, and it is all so subtle that no words can describe it. It is perfect.
The end:
Once one leaves the theatre with such good impressions, with a mixture of feelings for the words, for the characters, for the recently lived experience and has to go to the tube on the way home, one has a very negative shock. You go in and hear once again "if you forget to touch in and out your oyster card you will pay the maximum cash fair" and once again and once again and one wishes to be back in the theatre seating and looking down at the empty black box which will soon be in use again for inspiring a new set of audiences, with new expectations, who might come out longing for the same words again.

2006-12-01T12:57:00.000-02:00

The lions
Friday was a big day and I survived!!! Only one week later do I find time to write about this and there is already so much more to speak of! The pictures from my last post are the pictures of my experimentation.

Impressions and a few important comments:
It was not a good idea to show only the recording of the installation, the changing of media, as it was well observed by one person present at the crits, is negative for the presentation of the work in many senses. One because it is hard to understand from the video what was actually done in space. Second because it loses in proportion and therefore, inevitably, loses meaning. Third because the viewers are sepparated from the work in a way that the impressions drawn from it are actually being drawn from an entirely new video work which was not meant to be.
What I could see from the various reaction I had is a need to focus on one aspect of the various ideas I have been looking at. I have to define a theme. This experiment was important for seeing some of what works, some of what I would like to work with differently, but I did throw many things in there at the same time and those need to be refined. The purpose, the idea, and the elements need to be refined. It is words, it is image, it is space. It is what is between the lines and how it expands into air. This is the first choice, then I need to choose what words, what lines and how they come out and conquer, modify and inhabit space.
Last but not least: who am I speaking to? Who do I actually want to speak to and why?

The pictures are stills of the space created through the use of many texts. There was a speaker as well. There was the reading of a text which could not be published in the blog.

2006-12-01T12:38:00.000-02:00

2006-11-21T20:45:00.000-02:00

today...
the first visual/sound experience went well. In the begining I had to fight my technological ignorance and overcome some difficulties with the projectors, computers, dvds and cables. One important thing I learned: projection is different from paper in many aspects but one really important is that the white background is not "transparent" but the black!!!!! My graphic design experience misled me into thinking the opposite.....
As the light outside faded into darkness the images inside became clearer. At this point - the begining of the visual development - I worked only with projections, testing different scales, paces, overlapping and distances, however the space was naked, filled with its mute white walls. This screamed at me, the absence of my hand (or anybody's hand) on the wall brought an akward raw visual sensation. The problem was that it was not white by choice of visual communication, it was white from lack of preparation. This white, the careless abandoned white bothered me. And yet it was good that it bothered me. It was good, for now I have decided on textures, layers, tangible fillings to the space is something I want to include in my work. I already knew this but I got carried away with the novelty, the surprise of new discoveries - natural, since working with video is new to my practice. I want to phisically transform space and use video to expand and involve the other senses.
Textures, fabrics, layers, mirrors and concrete words in space have become the second step.

voices
the overlapping of voices - spoken text - on space, the landscape of tones, sounds and pauses can be taken further. They create a new space I would like to investigate. These are also included in the idea of layers, in another sense.
The way it worked was: Lizzy read part of the story, which gives an idea of what goes on in the second part. At this moment the only projections are a street scene, the frying of an egg and details of a house. All these images are presented in the text as well. Then: a blind man chewing gum, a sudden stop of the bus and finally breaking eggs lead the narrative, as if we were in the characters head, into a change of perception, which is portrayed through the projection of words over the previous projections and the overlapping of voices and languages.

space
one thing I noticed through this process is the importance of recreating and transforming the whole space. Today I only used one corner of the room and for the video documental recording could look interesting, however the feeling of the performance did not invite the viewer to the fullest.

There is lots more to write, however, the lived experience has to settle down and enable my words to embrace it. Then, and only then, will they be my lived experience, through my words for sharing.... with that, I postpone any further analysis for tomorrow.

I will drop here the text I used for this work in the same way as it was used. The original text is longer, greater, full of details, descriptions and complex ideas. This one is a colage of bits and pieces which provide an introduction to the idea of the performance. It was translated in order to adapt my purposes in a way that it cannot be seen as a translation of the original, but more as an interpretation. The name of the tale is "Love" by the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector.

"Her sons were truthfully good. They grew up, bathed, expected all the time more fulfilling moments. She finally had a big kitchen, the broken stove made creaking noises. The heat was very strong in the apartment they were slowly paying off. However, the wind blowing through the curtains she had made reminded her that she could stop and dry her forhead while facing the horizon. Like a farmer. She had planted her seeds, not any others, only these. Trees now grew from them. In the same way her brief conversation with the postman was growing, the water that filled the sink was growing, her sons were growing, the dinner table was growing, her husband arriving with the newspaper and smiling, hungry. She would give her hand out to anything, her chain of life.
Deep down she had always had the need for feeling that things were firmly rooted. This was what Home provided her with. By some strange paths she found herself in a woman’s destiny and it fit her as if she had invented it.
All her vaguely artistic desires were, for a long time now invested in creating beautiful, fulfilling days. In time, her taste for decoration had developed and overcome her intimate disorder. She seemed to have discovered that everything could be worked to perfection. That each thing could be visually harmonic, that life could be handmade by man. Her former youth seemed to her strange as a disease. She had slowly grown to discover that one could also live without happiness, abolishing it. She had discovered a legion of people, who were previously invisible and who lived as one works – with persistence, continuity and joy. Whatever happened to her before this home was out of reach. A disturbing anxiety which sometimes could be mistaken for an unbearable happiness. Instead, she built for herself something she could understand, an adult’s life. This was her choice.
Somewhat tired, on this day, with things she’d bought shaping a fabric, she got on a bus. Resting the bag on her lap as the bus moved she laid back with a half satisfied smile.
The bus slowly moved and stopped again as she spotted a man. The difference between him and the others was that he was actually really still. He stood up with his hands projected forward. He was blind. There was something strange about him... then she realised.... he chewed gum. A blind man chewed gum.
She still had time to stop and think that her brothers were coming over for dinner – her heart beat violently. He chewed in complete darkness. The movement of his chewing made it look as if he was smiling and suddenly not smiling, smiling and then not smiling again. She kept looking at him – suddenly the bus moved, throwing her unexpectedly backwards. The heavy bag fell from her lap onto the ground.
Unable to move and recover her bag she was pale and an imcomprehensible, uncertain expression, long time forgotten, took over her face. The eggs had broken.
It suddently seemed to her like people stood barely balancing over darkness – and for one moment a lack of direction could make them so free that they would not know where to go. Noticing this absense of law was so sudden the she held on to the front seat as if she would fall off the bus, as if things could be inverted in the same peaceful manner as they were not."

2006-11-16T16:47:00.000-02:00

visual experimentations
(just like creating a new receipe and getting the full taste of it through the process)
tuesday I will put somethings up on the studios and see how they work. It will be the initial testing phase the very begining of developing and thinking visually some of these words and images that make me now. For this stage I chose a narrative. Actually, this narrative is the very first one I had chosen and due to my familiarity with it I believe it will make a good starting point. Through this work I enter a dark room and light a candle, through this work I hope to look at my project and see it all more clear, warmer, closer to accomplishment. No right or wrong, just choices.

the narrative
this is one day in a woman's life. One day which could be any day at all. However on this day she notices she is alive, she notices that there are people around her and she is surprised to notice it. And as she notices it, as these entirely new thoughts of common things flash through her head, they change the all familiar things, for she looks at them with new eyes. Suddenly her everyday ride seems like going through an entirely new path. So much so that she misses her stop and as she tries to head home it is only after a while that she realises which way to go. All familiar places seem to be inhabited by new words, new thoughts, new senses, which make them almost foreign.... even though they are her words and thoughts. They flood from the unexpected discovery of a new day.

a bit of the process
there is a lot more to the text than the narrative. Actually, I'd say the narrative is secondary, as the description of feelings and sensations take a major role on the text. There is a contrast between the street, where the realisation takes place, and the house, the intimate familiar space where every single detail is amplified. There is much to play with words and ideas.

2006-11-13T21:04:00.000-02:00

As things were starting I had a vague idea, one inspiration, of a writer and the writing of hers I would use. Then came the turmoil and everything changed around. Then Italo Calvino might have become more important, as well as some poets, who knows if Robert Graves or Carol Ann Duffy. However, that inicial Brazilian writing, the one that has always been present in my expriences and I would love to share, is still dancing in my thoughts, floating around my ideas... and may be why not a colage! Since I did start going into the visuals with it, why not carry along. May be just for the sake of experimentation (I could always change the text, all the ideas and use these elements), may be just because on my birthday I will be thrown in a Roman arena (cross course crit) with lions ready to devour me, my ideas and the visuals which I cannot chose yet!!

I would like to say a few words about friday.
On friday I left college and went to the Anish Kappoor Exhibition, very small, very beautiful. Everything touched me, sometimes for the loss of perspective, a dizziness one feels due to the tricking of the senses (are you close? are you far? what's the shape of the object you are looking at?), sometimes due to the perfection of the shapes which devour you or invite you to live inside and sometimes for the perception that you are part of the work, since it is your reflection, your relation to it that brings it into existence.
The exhibition, from what I read, had been a collaboration with Salman Rushdie, however, I could not feel Rushdie's presence, maybe because I was looking for words (and what beautiful words can he write). There were no words in space, just the ones that through the shapes I evoked in my head. May be they were contained in the shapes or, who knows, maybe they gave form to the shapes even before this all started.

observation. I still have not figured out how to upload pictures into this blog!!! HELP.

2006-11-10T12:21:00.000-02:00

space and text
Bachelard builds and creates spaces through words. We, as readers, can travel through them as if it were our own space. As if his descriptions were part of our memories. The same with poetry, written images that transcend the textual language and become our own.
Foulcault changes and can almost recreate through writing Velazques' Las Meninas. Once the pictorial space is looked at through Foucault's description it becomes a new experience, almost a new space. Visually how could words be thrown and arranged in space so as to change it. What would this space be? And what are the words? Should they describe space or just give it a new texture? Should they ask questions?
Calvino describes cities, invisible cities, which become visible and live to us by his language, by his ordering of abstract signs which to us make sense as words. Which to us will be, for each person, a different space according to the experience we have of these words. And from this point the cities, the spaces, the images, start to exist. One can walk through it's streets, lose thoughts in one of them, leave memories behind, see a camel, or a ship or even the people who walk these cities, who inhabit them.
These are all interesting ways of looking at language and the birth or transformation of images. I feel like I have to live the words I chose, to make them my own and visually express them, and write them, or repeat them out loud. Still thinking how to do this!

2006-11-07T15:12:00.000-02:00

Today things seem to be going back to their natural order, until it is swept off the floor again by questioning thoughts. The ideas seem misty still, but they are taking form. It is definetly words, text, I want to work with. Text and images, continuity, text without images besides the ones created by the floating in space of text (be it spoken or written), images continuing the text and no words, then words just as its pure materiality and no meaning, just the pure texture of words and the material images they create. So the idea is using words, images and space. How the words fit and organize themselves in space and how the audience can perceive the space created by the words... and the images.
How is it to arrive in a new place filled with words, or how is it to suddenly realize, in a familiar space the presence of new or old words, the new perception of an old familiar place. What are the feelings of arriving at a certain part of the text, or in another, what new images are created in relation to the space and the words. How are they different through perspective.
This is just the beggining.

2006-11-02T12:55:00.000-03:00

words, words, words, images, words, images, images, words as images....
Text viewed as image and as text, with content, to create new images.
Text as description. Text as a space for reflection, as a starting point for reflection.
Drawing with words and the ability of creating image.
Words as representation of the world, words as signifiers of the world. Words for changing and becoming images.
As I lose myself in thoughts of what is to become my work those are ideas that travel through my mind. I am not certain yet as to what I will do with them, however I drop them here, as they might make more sense to me.

I will post here a quote by Foucault from "The Order of Things". It is a moment of the book when he refers to language in Don Quixote, to the book and how the use of language in the book works. Many ideas might come from here.
"He takes things for what they are not, and people one for another; he cuts his friends and recognizes complete strangers; he thinks he is unmasking when, in fact, he is putting on a mask. He inverts all values and all proportions, because he is constantly under the impression that he is deciphering signs; for him, the crown makes the king."

2006-10-26T10:15:00.001-03:00

getting started...
It has always been hard starting things, even a blog! Since all derives from something, I decided to begin with a thought. There is lots to say, but the words refuse to emerge and for now they are just tickling inside. I describe this moment as an internal battle, words and thoughts flying around in a vast confined space of my mind crashing back and forth trying to find one purpose, one path to come out free to transform themselves in your ears and mouths, in your internal space and even on a piece of paper.

I start with a quote, which I translated from a Brazilian writer. I apologize for my translation which will not be the best that can be done, but it is the best I can do, and I hope it makes sense.

"I don't understand. This is so vast that is beyond any understanding. To understand is limited. However, not understanding can have no boundaries. I feel that I am much more complete when I do not understand. Not understanding, in the way that I speak of, is a gift. Not understanding, not like a simple minded. It is good to be intelligent and to not understand. It is a strange blessing, like having madness without being mad. It is a lack of interest at ease, it is a sweet dumbness. But once in a while comes a turmoil: I want to understand a little. Not too much: but at least understand that I do not understand."
- Clarice Lispector

Clarice Lispector wrote short stories and novels. Her narrative is sowed with her characters internal questions, quests, surprises and emotions. These are puzzling, wonderful thoughts which overflow and which I devour and keep in secret places. They are tangled in my world of words and in time (hope it doesn't take a long time) they are coming to the surface... transformed.