formas in abstractione et oblitus.
The price of potatoes has increased.
“ You ma would eat a horse”
He left his socks in the pub
“ Another cup of tea”
The scones are fresh.
The window was locked
A smashed bottle grows where the daffodils lie.
A light two-step in the rain.
What is to perform?
A man walks in a circle.
A lady screams.
A boy kicks the wall.
A woman stands in her dressing gown with curlers in talking to the milkman.
The density of daily troubles me at present. An endless complication as to what the performance may mean; a sodden battle entrenched with ambiguity, uncertainty and inner conflict. We should perform better. What an amazing performance. That was shocking. I haven’t seen a performance like that for a long time.
I would like to digress from the term performance and perhaps lean towards terms of enactment, embodiment and even exorcism. The act of enabling and facilitating the body; using movement as medium to enact, explore, respond and recreate the issues, complexities and realities of everyday life. I call everyday life; ‘Practice.’ In this sense all experiences we are granted, which we endure, protest against, fight for, these form the substance of the reality in which we situate ourselves. I am keen to see this term; ‘Performing Practice’ as in reality; a strategy of performing life. A means of communicating and finding strategies, which convey a means to explore the nature of daily experience.
‘The goal of performance installation is, therefore, to uncover spaces of experience and transformations of bodily states that raise questions about physical and mental conditions.”
I trace traces. Liminal form, perhaps to avoid the duet with humanity which performance creates. To conceal and to reveal. An endless guise.
The body in the city acts as vessel; to carry, contains and interacts; forming routes and navigations through the immediacies of its encounter. The body in the city becomes a means to extend the discourses of the mind and architecture to a frontal physical plane. The experience of the body as it moves through its decided and undecided routes of the complex labyrinth becomes synthesis; forming in such modes of encounter a reflection as to the physical landscape it temporally habits. (Meo tamen iterum dico)
To consider the body an artifice for reflection as to the affects of urbanisation; modern progress and development allows a humanist discourse to form around the concrete slabs which form the densely textured urban scene. How the body is positioned in space; how it occupies and passes through various plaza, streets and passage ways can function as means for discourse as to the nature of affect the city may have on the psychology of urban human behaviour and simultaneously affords insight as to how the city is formed and cemented by the very patterns which human occupancy projects. This mutual dialectical relationship becomes synonymous to concepts as to how far cities are designed for people and how people essentially redesign and augment the fabric of urban texture. The embodiment of the urban experience by the human form becomes focus for this research; how far can the body enter a state of conscious reflection as to its use and positioning within the built environment to observe and how can such conscious observations be then potentially be reapplied to generate shifts in land use patterning and generate possible realms of progress within discourses of spatial planning.
To make performance, to choreograph is perhaps to form a logic to the system and construction which the body experiences. The experience of place which site specific performance may allow can present a dynamic reinterpretation of location, which allows both the performer and the audience to re-calibrate their relationship to the sensitivity of landscape. Performance can act as a social and spatial filter, systematically crafting the conditions in which the choreographer wishes their conceptions of site. In this sense the site specific choreographer becomes a social facilitator, creating and crafting specific conditions by which an audience can experience or re-experience the site in question.
Perhaps my work aims to explore how far dance can become a valid and logical system for the investigation of various sites and experiences in our environment, as perhaps outside of choreographic contexts the dissemination of place and its various strata’s of activity remain too complex for the dancers body to encapsulate in any form of totality; yet one can argue the living, thinking, perceptive body has the ability to narrate the site by means of engaged critical discourse;
How far can a performance subvert or alter the experience and reality of the fabric of a site, more specifically a studio or theatre space? As a performance begins to ‘overtake’ a studio or theatre and infiltrate the daily realities of its existence; how far does the space and adapt and change to this intervention? Can a neutral performance space ever truly encapsulate the experience of a memory of a location?
The body in the construct allows us a means to wager the city battles and torments; to reflect itself as the power it holds or desires. The body becomes emblem, endlessly attempting to symbolize its endeavors. It’s dwelling becomes an extension of such will; the abode in which the body surrenders to society’s surmount.
How far it is possible for dance as spatial medium and embodied form of expression of the experience of space to transmit received and gathered information as to the context and history of an experience to an audience. The reliance on the body in this process becomes seminal, in order to create a performance experience for an audience which strives to facillate the heightened understanding of the context in question, which in this piece is post conflict Belfast, the dancer must be confident in their body’s ability to act a viable social transmitter. In this context, the actions and capabilities of the body run in tandem to the perception of performance to create a spatial and psychological experience of space which will allow, for them, to revisit their preconceptions of the socio-political context in question.
The search for a past perhaps, a haunting nostalgia for a past, which I had no physical place in, only sounds of memories which are not my own; yet somehow through bloodline I feel drawn too.
A desire to mend my bike on Innis Mor, another lost bicycle. A desire to live in a small house, with love and a crust. A place of dreams.
A desire to feel the sea each morning and to fix the roof of the cottage the man said no one wanted on the edge of the Island. The desire to become a hermit.The desire to run a dance class on the Island and that to be all.
I keep its photograph in my pocket and wonder if I can thatch and what that would mean.
A questioning if it possible to fall in love with a landscape with all its faults and somehow seeing its anger and pain only end up wanting to love and nurture more. A concern as to what this feeling is and wondering why this gut feeling has never gone away..
Urban re:passages 