Contextual reference- about Plan B performances

Taken entirely from this site; artists that work with toys, cameras, stories- something to come back to. i have highlighted bits of immediate interest.

Some things we have been thinking about lately…
questions we ask ourselves
Q: What is plan b?
A: Plan b can stand for Balham, Brighton, Bristol, and now Berlin and it can stand for all those who want to start again try another way.
We often talk of things not being ‘the Plan b way' we use this to make the other feel bad if they are mean, unkind, thoughtless, cruel, bitchy. I thought about an unwritten manifesto once in bed it went a bit like...
Plan b will not shout in performances, they will endeavour to make you comfortable, they will have open hearts and be honest at all times, Plan b is about you and me - you are free to come and go as you please.
And now if Plan b were to be visible it would just be traces of places that have affected us or stopped us in our tracks - obsessions with clouds, writing in sand, scary fish, airports, shop displays, a winter wonderland and a ghostly house.
I would like to say that Plan b could also stand for ‘being here’ (in a kind of dreadfully punning way, but seriously). What is it to really be in the moment, at this very location? Sitting in our studio, side by side, while I type this and Soph types some other notes for a proposal… The very things that are purposefully edited out of touring theatre work so that it can go anywhere, pretending that the black walls of studio theatres are all the same. Our work strives to respond to where we are now. That’s why we spend our summers sweating inside a building making 1:100 scale models of the art institution we were in. In that piece Me the City we wanted to shrink the world around us in order to try and understand it and examine it. Research and stories that sprung from that place were then projected large again alongside our live manipulation of the model and miniatures – a world that from the digital images stuck on model buildings was nearly believable. From our 3 camera angles we tried to create a film that used the low tech aesthetic to make what we hoped would be urban voodoo: by playing on our carpet with our model could we in fact make it snow outside? Could we entice strangers to meet and kiss outside the registry office?
Q: And as a ‘duo’ who inevitably work with dialogue why do we say that we work with ‘Spontaneous text’ instead of Improvised text?
A: Because Improvisation has all the wrong connotations and nuances from a completely different world, we’re artists, for god sake and these things are important to us. Improvisation is a tool actor’s use and it stays as a workshop technique within the framework of narrative theatre tradition. Spontaneous text as we mean it is something quite different – it usually involves the very careful defining of context and concept way before a word is spoken. It hates rehearsal and repetition. It is the utterances of people trying to be in the moment and in the context and here and now with as much of themselves as they can manage. It tries to answer the hardest question an audience member can ask of contemporary performance practice – why have you asked us here?
But to answer this question straight away is also a mistake and perhaps the mistake of dogmatic, narrative theatre making.
The art, as it were, is not to answer the question right away but to stay with the uncomfortable-ness and impossibility of the question because that is where the interesting territories are to be found.
Spontaneous text is a way of challenging The Text or previously constructed/crafted dramaturgy - rather one that responds to a 'nowness' of performing.
Q: How do you set up situations for Spontaneous Text?
A: we began with How do you keep on talking even though you have said everything you thought possible? In that piece we became the Girl and Clown from the infamous television test card F, which began in 1967 and has been shown more than any other program over 70,000 hours. We wanted to use this iconic, nostalgic and with the increase of viewing hours increasingly rare image as a way to talk about people stuck together. It was at times Kafkaesque and Beckettian and other times funny, banal, ridiculous and sad. We asked each other questions like; what is fluff? Do you think we are no longer needed? Are you real? What else could we do for a job? Do you think anyone is watching? And were interrupted by the muzak of test cards reminding us to retake our original position of being in an eternal game of nougats and crosses.
In a way Bed full of songs was also a spontaneous text but of song. In bed we set ourselves the task of singing all the songs we could remember and writing them down on a duvet till it was full. In both these pieces the audience were made comfortable as if in a domestic space with carpet, cushions, inflatable chairs – anything that would be a contrast to the hardness of a theatre seat, which required you to stay. As they were both long pieces, between 4 – 5 hours, the audience was free to come and go as they pleased.
As a task The Last Hour wanted to limit this endless time experienced in these works and put pressure on our ‘spontaneous text’. We were to say to each other truthfully what we would want to say to each other in the last hour – our confessions, affirmations and anger timed by a chess clock. As the statement was finished the other was forced to respond or move on, really listening was imperative and inescapable. Dressed as if this were a conference and directing the text to the audience and the listeners who were receiving the piece live on radio it was an intense experience for all. The end of the hour was not a clear state; was it the end of us, of the world or just the performance?
Q: What is the difference between the spontaneous text pieces and the more set pieces such as Me the City or your recent work in progress Wonderworld?
The more set pieces have always had a desire to continue the spontaneous text yet in making the works they have necessitated a framework, which gets nearer a ‘show’. Therefore a structure is put in place and a rough outline is made but no lines are learnt and an openness is still required. Because both pieces are about trying to condense experiences in the world; one is the scale of buildings such as in Me the City and in Wonderworld it was about trying to condense a 133 km journey. On our tandem we set off for a castle where we had a residency and made the journey to the venue the focal point. The arduous task of working together on this joint venture of physical stamina and co-operation made the end point, our destination, foremost in our minds. It quietened us. Yet we thought a lot about human power, inventors, efficiency, and coupledom. We were public and were we choose to position ourselves (front or back) played a large part in how we were viewed as in charge or not – yet our unusual tandem with brakes and gears at the back meant a finer more sophisticated set of negotiations had to be made. The performance took seven stages of this journey as opportunities to represent these experiences in different ways. Added by Kraftwerk’s Tour de France and R. Kelly’s I Believe I can fly we peddled our way through journeys that we take daily, make especially and the one that will end: life.

the rites of spring at RFH- stereoscopic video, dance and orchestra

in exploring the relationship between time based media and visual performance, thought back to this which i saw in june at royal festival hall.

from the south bank website link sent in June 2007 (link no longer live)

'A UK premiere. Digital artist Klaus Obermaier, conductor Marin Alsop and the London Philharmonic Orchestra create a 21st-century realisation of Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring.

A unique audio-visual experience, the audience wear 3D glasses to experience fascinating distorted visual effects dictated by Stravinsky's innovative score and the movements of dancer Julia Mach. Electronic sensors and cameras pick up changes in the dynamic and tempo of the music, which trigger changes in the virtual interpretation of the work.

Modern masterpieces Arcana by Edgard Varèse and Prelude from Akhnaten by Philip Glass complete the evening. '


most people were speechless afterwards...but was this for the dazzling special effects taking you back to the childhood delights of seeing jaws in 3D? more than any sense of a mutually beneficial audio-visual relationship? this was a live video experience with the screen above the orchestra and figure moving in 3D on it, reaching out and feeling like a whispering distance to your face. the formalities and traditions of the orchestra, lead violin arriving last to applause,conductor then taking his stand seemed in very stark contrast to the seductive state of the art visuals, but maybe that was the point.i have no doubt that the majority of the audience seemed to be there for the latter ear wigging on conversations later in the bar. i have found these views online;

from the independent;

'The pity is that, agape at the visuals, you don't give the music the attention it deserves. The LPO's [london philharmonic orchestra] playing, under the spunky direction of Marin Alsop, was technically and texturally superlative, yet even at its most tumultuous I was only partially aware of its details: proof if any were needed that the sense of sight dominates the other senses whenever it can. Obermaier hopes that his Rite will stimulate questions about "authenticity of experience" in modern life. However, I'm not so sure. But, that doesn't detract from his dazzling achievement.'

i am very struck by this 'sense of sight dominates the other senses whenever it can.' needs further exploration. i did myself find the level of awe and wonderment in engaging with the digital trickery meant, sadly, i stopped listening after a while.

from guardian unlimited;

'The wow factor turns even more intense when the "floor" on which the virtual Mach dances tilts and her body is pitched into space, looming so far towards us that her hands appear to touch us, then retreating so far back she seems a dot in apocalyptic emptiness.

The disappointment, however, is that Obermaier has only a limited interest in following the dramatic logic of the score. He has effects aplenty, making Mach's body dissolve into galaxies of stars, sending a roaring wave of patterned light across Stravinsky's climactic finale. But because there is no developing structure to his choreography or image-making, this Rite ends up being about precocious trickery. Obermaier may be a master of the digital arts, yet when it comes to delivering their emotional or theatrical potential he is still an apprentice.'

the simplicity of movement of the full figure, circling with ribbons on the screen was beautiful, very fluid and worked easily with the music. the problem i had was the doubled ended foot things (no photos i could find on ole google) some loosely dada-derivative, seem to verge on the ridiculous and lost it for me. the 3D grid flowing tossing the figure also hinted more of homogenised computer simulation kelly lebrock in weird science than embodying a tumultuous ride aurally.

none-the-less a tremendous experience of whats happening in contemporary cross-arts practice, and its to be commended that the royal festival hall and the london symphony orchestra took this leap and brought in, i would imagine, quite a new audience.i would say watch this space, i hope that the fusion will continue to develop in more directly beneficial ways and that all the relevant senses are considered.... i will always continue to advocate that the visual effect must be well considered and develop a concept/narrative/collage of significance to the accompanying performance...in a one-click digital artwork culture of neon glow filters (grrr don't get me going now) its always a grave danger that as cheap effects are more and more 'free' and accessable to all (its amazing how many digital artists are popping up with little understanding of the visual image) effects are taking over artistic merit.....don't digital-pop-art-warhol-style-face me now...

Contextual Connections- Peter Richards- Pinhole performances

ok- so following a cross-course tutorial in which the link between my thoughts on linking photography and performance was questioned (which has meant that, rightly so in retrospect,now i have to really get on with considerations in a much more direct way what this connection means, what is this world in between? and how is there a purposeful link between the act of recording and/or process of image making/ engagement with photograph as a performative act in some way to start to make connected work and try to avoid mis-communication) i have started more looking back at the work of others', exploring one aspect of my proposed learning agreement for traditional photography. i must also get on with camera lucida:) i have been looking at whether anyone else had been exploring this with particular reference to pinhole photography and performance, and so peter richards popped up. i remembered having seen a copy of this work a few years ago. although lengthy the text describing his work on his website shows his whole playful process of staging long pinhole exposures in various locations and various engagements with participants.this work was written in a fantastic account linking with a photo booth art work in joshua sofaers essay, conflict of interest: performance as a spectator sport he writes; 'the camera is the performative sculptural mechanism which facilitates the performance. The giant cardboard obscura ........ [is] site (as the stage in theatre) and source (the text - the actors) of the work.' I need to come back to this text, examining its realtion to camera lucida. i should also consider how this work connects with the ideas explored in our frenchmottershead participaton project.

luxury always has a story to tell....part one

in harrods or is it disneyland-with-an-inflated-pricetag today....this guy was so still (top image) i thought he was a duane hanson sculpture(bottom)

contextual connections- OFFF 2007

DJ Krush visuals

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Sperm-ND/Clark

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and yet again another fab time at OFFF in may this year. The highlights for me were no-domain, an audio-visual, motion graphics, live visuals, designers collective based in barcelona, full of crazy live drawing, puppets, stop frame animtions, pure filmed visuals without lots of the horror of stereoscopic-tunnel-fractals-mash up special effects, purely devised and created from scratch.these guys have helped me so much in a puppet vj project with students earlier this year. i like the fact that they don't like to call themselves vjs to disassociate themselves with the generic vj scene, they are as much of a live act as the music, with mini sets, be it of 2D puppets,zoetrope, live drawing, anything lo-fi. sometimes digital technology is used simply to get their work on the screen with live feed from drawing. from their website; "they use their full creativity in the shape of distorted lo-tech psycodelic visual pop" sonar,2006. their work poses questions for me about live perfromance in a music gig, when the traditions of screen based concert visuals is viewed alongside watching visual artists performing live, through using low tech sets mixed live with real time and pre recorded film. how and when do you keep the attention on music as opposed to the art and vice versa at the right times? fusing art forms adds a multi-sensory interactive arts dimension to the concert experience, that places like the ICA have been staging for a while now.

dave clarke, visuals

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i have been insanely inspired by their approach in my teaching (low fi is great as schools just don't have the equipment and it also shows the value in mixing high and low) and for my own live visuals work for gigs, it was a pleasure to meet up with them (now that's one bonus of myspace networking) at OFFF. in a digital saturated age, it was refreshing to meet guys who still have their pencil cases at close hand....

contextual connections- barbara ess taken from aperture

my fascination with pinhole began when teaching photography A level years ago, making cameras out of biscuit tins and pringles tubes, the latter being my favourite form for its incredible distorting capabilities. it creates vast depth of field, and also gives subjects a haunting vignetted allegorical quality, breathing an air of mystery and intrigue. the characteristics of pinhole lend them self to my theme of presence of absence.the lengthy exposures take photography back to its early origins, making you consider the implications for passage of time. this is in three ways- firstly replicated in image making qualities- ghostly trails if something moves, secondly the physical act of staying still exposing for anything from a few seconds to a minute depending on container as camera and lighting conditions- (camera shake can result or cameras get blown over if very light weight,) and thirdly the performative act of using a camera- how others perceive you (take for example a 7 minute binhole exposure of the car park at college i did with students, colleague comes out from reception having seen us on cctv, and wonders why we are standing there checking out his car with a dustbin placed next to it;) i have used pinhole in sedna stories, projected photo-illustrations for inuit folk tales phd performance by my music crazed-genius-composer-friend- dr kerry andrew, the first venture back into my own practice 2 years ago....(kerry and i were teaching together and she babbelled on about needing a visual artist for a visual-music-theatre phd project she was doing, and uh, did i know anyone that might be interested...to which i said, er, yes, me!!!)

the rest of this post is taken from a hugely inspirational book, i am not this body photographs by barabara ess, on the site www.aperture.org

"Book Synopsis
"Barbara Ess makes subtly-toned photographs that are not so much reality as visionary versions of it. Blurry and distorted, they seem to coax their subjects from mysterious spaces."
—Grace Glueck, The New York Times

"Ess's images often have a dreamy subterranean quality—part wonder and part menace—as if culled directly from the subconscious."
—Gregory Volk, ARTnews

I Am Not This Body investigates primary, personal experience and relies upon the viewer's imagination and memories. Barbara Ess is renowned for her accomplished use of the pinhole camera and her effort to "photograph what cannot be photographed." Ess's is a conscious quest to explore what she calls "ambiguous perceptual boundaries: between people, between the self and the not self, between in here and out there." In her view, "reality... includes a perceiver, who has memories, thoughts, desires, emotions—[which] a normal camera tends to omit." The strange and affecting images she coaxes from this primitive camera manage to evoke the sublime and the impossible, the textures of desire and loss.

Over the past two decades Barbara Ess has participated in numerous exhibitions, including a large retrospective of her work at the Queens Museum in 1993. She also works with video and installation."

contextual connections- complicite- a disappearing number

this performance of complicite at the barbican gave me lots of projection ideas; back projecting film with shadow interplay of performers, live feed from camera in an OHP front projected. I was particularly struck by Helena's blog saying projections were used as a backdrop/ set/collage ,( my usual way of working with projections on a screen,) but that they also became person/performer in front projection, use of hands talking, viewing pages in a book being turned- photos/text and personal letters, projecting from the OHP view. i found this show very visually rich.
in the discussion afterwards it struck me how much i need to develop a greater understanding of style, structure, language of performance to push my visual interjections in new ways. hence reaching for the recommended reading list, and camera lucida by barthes......

i have my complicite-esque guinea pigs lined up in the shape of 14 and 15 year old art students......am trying out some of the back projecting and shadow play ideas within a workshop with schools, animated living gallery, where art works are brought to life through stop frame animation, back projected,and then shadow play within animation, or as live action to frozen tableaux type stills....lets see what kids can do with it :)

contextual references- eve bonneau- spill festival

'body’ is the first word I say by eve bonneau - spill festival, shunt vaults, april 2007. the dusty cavernous vaults beneath london bridge station have had for me some very different uses of the space, some more relevant to the space than others- from sitting in tiered seating(you could have been anywhere) in one performance to being left alone to meander around discovering gems along the way protruding out of walls, or looking a bit shifty at the end of tunnels in others. my favour is with the latter non seating use of this vault, undertaking a nervous journey to get there before things begin.this nerve-wracking experience is even better if you are with someone who's going in the vault for the first time or maybe used to a 'traditional' auditorium and you can watch mentally trying to work out how they can safely-make-it-back-fairly-soon-into-the-real-world- of-the-station-beyond..... bonneau's performance involves you travelling to your destination at the very end of the vault, as you get closer you start wondering whether she is naked, and as you get there you realise she is, clutching nervously a bare light bulb. you are then slammed-door-shut-in and it begins.... you watch bonneau child like exploring her body through light, in front of you sitting on the floor. light switched on and off as she moves around the space, suddenly appearing directly next to you breathing on your ear lobe, as well as a second later appearing huddling in a corner. this shifts as she moves behind a screen, playing with the bulb now through shadow interplay. she distorts her shape as she changes distance and direction form the screen.this changes as a multimedia projector of s=close ups of her body appears on the screen, tiny at first but she then pulls it back, physically handing this projector like a child working out what this toy can do. as the screen is thrown up and the video projection is thrown to the opposite wall, across the audience, we are all involved, we have been watching her, now her us.we gain that sense of awkwardness, once we were hidden in the dark observing the screen, passively like spectators in a cinema, and now we are the performers, being watched with the projections falling on us. people nervously shift around out of this light, pressing their bodies along the walls, trying not to be seen again, phew...bonneau continues this watch me watch you throughout. the shifting identities i mentioned in bardsleys work with pinhole, tracing changing roles, is played out here but in a very different way. this work also calls into question sourcing documentation. good ole google failed me on this one to be able to post a representative image, there is only one on the spill site and its poor. in talking to laura yesterday about documentation of performance,. its hard, and my written account here is only now becoming second hand and my opinion and not a patch on the real live experience. did anyone else see this piece? how was it for you.....

more contextual- julia bardsley at spill festival,shunt vaults

in thinking for a while about the relationship between photography and performance i went to see julia bardsley for her trans-act performance in the shunt vaults. the performance was very interdisciplinary and used herself in many derivitive forms- through self-imitating puppets/props (ventriloquist), dolls (mini -me ), actress (in a tv set) and also delighted as i was to discover, like a kid in a sweet shop, used herself in pinhole photography. The many forms and representations of self was incredible. she was engaged in a live act of self as director, engaged in dialogue with contained self playing from a dvd in a tv set, self as actor. the mini-me doll bardsley used here was self in the same green tailored suit holding a video camera, and became real self videoing mini-self and vice versa. i liked the fact that we could view the real live footage of the doll being filmed but that it would have also been interesting to investigate a way of the doll actually filming back.....who is watching who? ...the doll inspired my in the film- sound art collaboration i did with Ash Sargant for Wormhole Saloon at Whitechaopel Art Gallery using a mini me customised dolls house doll of self as an artist making work.

the use of pinhole photography in this work used this form of photographys incredibly ghostly, haunting qualities of very long exposures, giving an air of menace/nostalgia/the presence of absence. i liked the fact that you viewed the work as you entered the first of the 3 phases of the performance like a gallery, that as you progressed through the space, you came to witness through spyholes the work again, but this time in the world locked beyond in the wall. in this trapped world was suffocating fractures of the organised , precise gallery world, this tiny space was disrupted, abandoned, ransacked. minature pinhole photos were lying on the floor of the worlds' beyond space. this reduction in scale was also fascinating and peering into the behind the scenes, it was like the junk room at my parents house where eveything was thrown if there was an impending visit from my granny, giving the illusion of we always live like this;).... from this i have considered use of the relationship between the real live act and then the toys/dolls/scale model derivitive and how ghostly pinhole can begin an experience tracing shifting identities.

my contextual references..martin parr-ty time

ok, so martin parr has to be first up, my biggest inspiration, open toed sandles and stripey socks, deadpan geeky geezer full of irony, satire, abandoned mills and boons, sun beached whales, soggy spam, pruned to death suburban rose bushes......always posing the question, 'what is britishness?' and oh i do prattle on about him more than any other photographer....and so I find myself here asking why? he makes me laugh a lot at british nature, culture, which possibly isn't always a good thing, he has been said by some to be patronising in his unsympathetic depictions of class and commodity culture. his series on 'signs of the times' was particlarly notable, asking people who considered themselves to have good taste to respond to an advert and then pose for the camera,with 80s dancing coke cans, exclusive copies of the sun left out in the living room, floral toilet paper to give the bathroom a feminine touch...... i have used his style in juxtaposing clashing commodity elements in playful visuals for gigs, and have always been fascinated by lives which pass me by on the train which look like scenes from one of his photos....the other day i was at clapham junction station where a very mean faced man was wearing a cutesy poodle t-shirt...