Steve sent us away early in our groups to discuss where we were in the devising process and what we thought was the next logical step. I was concerned with our piece and its attempts to engage with history because our location (the raised seated area outside the waterside shopping centre) doesn’t have a particular history. During Steve’s introduction to the seminar I began thinking about what that area was particularly used for. The answer to this I thought of was conversation/communication.
After discussing the theme of communication we created an idea which involved playing a recorded conversation and miming over the top of it. This brings up the question of authenticity and ownership and whether someone else’s words become mine if I speak them and do the words lose their meaning. We are going to attempt to introduce palimpsest using the following means:
- Document people’s conversations (We began doing this in this week’s seminar). This methodology is similar to that used by George Pereck in his work ‘an attempt at exhausting a day in Paris’. We found that we only caught snippets of conversations which gave a brief glimpse into people’s lives ranging from the random and chatty to deep and meaningful conversations. We are going to select a few of these and stitch them together to create a manuscript in the same way the Pereck did.
- Record someone on site reading the manuscript. It is this recording that would be used in the final piece. Doing it this way creates a palimpsest both in the text (asking different people to speak) and in the location (many different people have spoken the same text in the same space).
As well as Pereck our piece relates with a number of practitioners. The idea of taking people’s personal stories and performing them links with Dee Headon’s autobiographical scriptography whereas Erving Goffman’s theory of ‘every day life being a spectacle correlates with the social and public aspect of our piece. The physicality aspect of the piece also relates back to a few weeks ago when we went out into the city with instructions (I am going to look at how we talk through our bodies in more detail later on).
Whilst we all agreed on the initial concept and location there are many elements which create a number of discussions. Different people had different ideas about ways in which to perform the piece which we will experiment with over the next few weeks including costume or no costume, miming or speaking with the track and learning the text or having it in front of us.
Basically our piece is trying to recreate a moment in life on site. Our main theme is authenticity and exploring questions of whether someone elses words become mine if I speak them etc. Ultimately a moment in life cannot be recreated accurately no matter how hard you try.
Over the course of this week I am going to research Pierre Bourdieu and his piece delegate as well as Miwon Kwon and her ideas surrounding the community and performance.
Joe Turner