We had a great time at Vicki Weitz's event last night (Live Art Platform: Picnic in the Church). It was a mixture of performances and installations ranging from a headphone piece recorded in surround sound by Mike Challis, to energetic counterbalancing dances by Base Dance. Dot and I made a 10 minute torchlit exploration of the space which was relayed through amplifiers and a television. We're very excited with the results, and are planning new variations on the piece…
Monday 22nd September 6-8.30pm
Meeting with Dot to test out plans for Colchester. Images and sound ended up being very scary, like insects or other scuttling creatures. Discussed the mutual benefits of the collaboration: we’ve each learnt huge amounts about using sound (Dot) and visuals (Holly) in ways we’d not been confident in before. I like the exchange of ideas, and the playfulness. It’s creating layers of meaning in the work where previously my work may have been to conceptual and dry…Having someone else to work with whose aims are so similar to my own has really helped me to challenge my practice and not stick to familiar areas.
Friday 19th September 2pm-4pm
Dot and I met at the Tea House to plan our joint performance in Colchester on the 27th. It will be held in St Martins Church (which has a beautiful tiles-and-wood floor), and we want to make this work very site specific and responsive to the atmosphere. It will also be interesting to ‘perform’ to an audience (however small it may end up being), because our previous floor survey pieces have been more of a personal exploration of a space with witnesses rather than audience members; shoppers have seen us walk past but we’ve not been doing a performance for them. With this in mind we have thought a lot more about lighting and choreography, whilst still keeping the conceptual focus on generating (extracting?) tiny sounds and visual textures from the space. I’ve become aware that my previous work with the contact mic on the bamboo cane is flawed, because you can hear the cane impacting on the surfaces without the amplification. I want to explore the element of surprise that comes when an object makes a sound which it isn’t supposed to make. For that reason I will be using a peacock feather to trace along the surfaces; it is inaudible unless attached to the mic, when it becomes rustling, and snagging, and slightly like a long breath. We will both be using torchlight to limit the focal point for the audience, and allow us to extract ourselves from the ‘performance’; the sounds and images are the most important thing, not the authorship. The peacock feather was chosen because of its sound qualities and the length of its reach, but I am aware that it is also hugely theatrical and ostentatious. I love the contrast between its historical associations with decadent costume and theatre and the tiny, hushed little sounds it will be generating in this performance. I also like the ritualistic action it will impart. I recently went to see Adam Chodzko’s show at Tate St Ives, which had some lovely playful mythologies, and I think the careful, studied routes Dot and I make through spaces has some similar grounding; we’ll be more responsive to the space as a church, as a site for ritual, and allow the objects we use in this performance to be more evocative.
Well, it's been a while, but we've done the Unit 5 weekender and been interviewed by Future Radio, and have all come away from it happy and tired and feeling like we've done something new and challenging. More details in a later post when I've gone through all the documentation…
