What’s all this. I’m trying to piece together a 20 minute set for a reading this month in Manchester. I enjoy this process but it always happens in a state of distraction, like having multiple tabs open in my brain.
I’ve begun as I often do: with a couple of pieces that hang together in a way that interests me, and an idea of what’s good about their relationship. Now I’m trying to develop that relationship by adding other existing texts and artworks, and by incorporating new ideas and new texts to edge the whole lot towards a self-contained performance.
So far I’ve got plasticine and a few texts.
I’ve got these balls of plasticine from a couple of years ago. I’d made some kind of plasticine scenario on a dinner plate – don’t ask why – and when I got bored with it and it was getting sticky and dusty I separated out all the colours again and rolled them into usable balls of red, and yellow, and blue, and so on.
Their primary domestic simplicity is good. Because of the list-like names I’ve given them, they’re imprinted with the meanings they accumulated on the dinner plate in the first place. And the things they once represented – the sky, the beaks, the dress, the apples – suddenly only count in terms of their colours. If you look at all the balls and their names you can get a sense of what might have been going on, but mostly you just get gaps. I like the gaps.
The texts are various. Some of them are quotes I’ve heard or read recently, and want delivering in their original voices, or at least my well-meaning impersonations of the voices. Others are short self-contained stories and scenarios written for their own sake, often in sets. I’d like to hold up each of these texts like plasticine accumulations of the things they’ve been and the gaps in between – a bit sticky and imprinted with the corners and contours of the things around them.
The event’s on the 20th, so there’s still time to get the gaps in the right places. Here are details:
THE OTHER ROOM 26
Wednesday 20th July 2011, 7.00 pm.
Chris Goode, Jonny Liron and Tamarin Norwood at The Old Abbey Inn, 61 Pencroft Way, Manchester, M15 6AY, on Manchester Science Park.
