This concept of Work or Task-like as a performance quality is explored in Yvonne Rainers essay A quasi survey of some “minimalist” tendencies…
some excerpts;
“in the early days of Judson Dance Theatre someone wrote an article and asked “Why are they so intent on being themselves?”…But where the question applies, it might be answered on two levels: 1) The artifice of performance has been reevaluated in that action,or what one does, is more interesting and important than the exhibition of character and attitude, and the action can best be focused on through the submerging of personality; so ideally one is not even oneself, one is a neutral “doer.” ”
Talking about notions around “movement-as-task or movement-as-object” Rainer states how the material in Trio A “no one part of the series is made any more important than any other… a great variety of movement shapes occur, but they are of equal weight and equally emphasised.” The bodies are anchored in “actual time”.
I have really found a lot of help and understanding of my taste and understanding for using performance within my own work from this essay and the Afterall single works book The mind is a Muscle. The way i find movement is often from quoting/references to other works or found movements. The use of work-like aproaches to making a performance allow me to put a series of different quotations together and see how it is read. Whether there needs a part of my own voice (in movement development) to create a more harmonious line is the second stage, the quotes become a collection to ‘curate’ and re structure to create some sort of question that is the performance.
Later on in the essay rainer discusses repetition as a means to create objectlike/objectify movement and the bodies. With the work i’m currently developing A boy stands in for a Rock or vice versa I wonder whether this may be a technique to test against the intensely slow degrading sculptural images I present. How would the two forms collide? a struggling collapsing body to a constant metronome-like body as a register.
