NOTES THAT HAVE BEEN MADE

Documentation

How is it interesting?

Documentation of live events- Tim Etchells.

Ø Documentation commodifies.

Ø Readings that distance viewers from the work itself.

Ø Commodifying a medium that resists documentation.

Audience throwing the performers breadcrumbs. The performers have to react to the narrative that the audience give.

The act of documentation.

Ø Video of an event or a person.

Ø Just a foot. Just an arm. By focussing on something so close, we lose the bigger picture.

Reminding the audience of who they are; like an amnesiac.

Ø Persuading the audience.

Ø Persuasive but not aggressive.

Ø Expect no response.

Documents of THEIR life. Piecing together who they are.

Amnesiac; functional documentation. When all memory is lost documentation becomes sacred and functional.

Inserting narrative onto people, imagined life. Recognising that documentation is actually fairly insufficient.



Areas of a person that define them- memories, favourite things, people that you know.



Does audience impose their own narrative onto us through the documents they discover? Or do we put them in the place where they are the focus.

When you disappear yourself.

Telling the audience who they are? How do we do this and take it from a one on one environment?

AMNESIAC

What makes identity? Amnesia is loosing everything at once. We forget things everyday but on a small scale. Documents are subservient to memories.

Reduction of identity to commodified documents. Re packaging a life into physical notes.

Reduction to physical mass. Awareness of that mass.

Answer phone messages, repackaging interviews, old TV shows, video snippets, diaries, relationships.

Meeting with Milijia: Thursday 23rd October

Reconstruction: composing ideas.

Ø Empty houses left after the Second World War.

Ø Ghosts of a building.

Ø Objective presentation.

Ø Dinner left on the table.

Ø A house,

o 'We went to a house, and this is what we found'.

o Fragments.

o A box that unfolds.

o Memory.

o Presented as fact.

Ø Trying to reconstruct a history. Plotting a story.

Ø A Short Film About Love.

Ø Verbatim theatre.

o Not immune to manipulation.

o Subjective reconstruction.

o Subject/Object.

Ø What to leave in. What to take out.

Ø What is the audience's role?

o Documenters?

o Facilitators.

Ø Krapp's Last Tape,

o Memories related to loss/pain.

o Triggered by particular situations.

Ø Trauma acted out involuntarily. Flashbacks. Nightmares.

Ø The trap of the universal.

Ø Re-enactment; remembering through play,

o Tattoo.

o Curing. Catharsis.

o Use of parody?

Ø Clothes in the wardrobe,

o A segment of performance.

Ø Absence and reconstruction.

Ø The holocaust.

Ø Amnesia,

o Metaphorical context.

o Socially constructed.

o An abstract term, not just forgetting.

o Has different meanings and contexts.

Ø Beckett,

o Self-construction and how the self operates.

o Ontological and philosophical.

o Historical context rarely provided; is it relevant?

Ø Needs to be anchored with a context?

Ø More abstract/conceptual direction? Challenging. Especially if it comes to audience participation. How do we get them to relate?

Ø Need to be masters of the piece for something to happen. Not just shut them in the room. For some installations it is hard to have patience. Needs hooks of some kind, if the audience are going to be engaged.

Ø The audience should not be left indifferent.

Ø TO PROVOKE.

Ø TO BE UNIQUE.

Ø SUBJECT AND CONTEXT: AN ANCHOR.

Ø A PARTICULAR INCIDENT.

Ø AN INVENTED PERSON.

Ø Signa (check out website),

o Rented a hotel wing.

o A durational piece.

o Lasted 4 or 5 days.

o Different rooms and different rules.

o Martha Rubin,

§ A fictional character.

§ A fortune-teller.

o Almost a group for historical reaction.

o Played games.

o Players, servants, master of the game and mistress of the game.

o The rules are read to the audience. Rules for the players and rules for the audience.

o http://signa.dk/oraclegames

Ø Mental note; what is wind?

Ø WHAT DO REALLY CARE ABOUT? MAKING THE AUDIENCE CARE/ENGAGE/RELATE.

Dissertation



Tape Recorder- Tape itself, sound of rewinding, fastforwarding, destruction, ability to erase, anonymity, confessions, only half the story, benign stuff, returning calls.



Phone- refiguring space, anonymity, voicemails,



Wardrobe- Collection of clothes, identity, self forged identity or imposed, aesthetic, construction on stage, selecting what to say about your self.

Bookcase- documentation of interests, non-linear narrative embodied, Intertextuality, combining through random selection.

Treadmill- being pushed to the point of physical exhaustion, never ending, how language changes under physical pressure, the damage being done to us, repetition, interferes with the art. Physical embodiment of struggle (to document) degradation of documenting.



Writing onto bodies- the audience leaving the own identity to be document (or facets of identity)

Shredder- making things again! (Wallace n Grommet Fire) Playful. Audience power. Willingness to burn things. Big machine to cycle things and destroy them.



Testing performers.

Board Games- getting them to play, remembering through play. In constant flux.



Moments of intimacy with cold hard physical facts- Kissing (video or onstage) small moments that make up a life. Jumping into swimming pool from diving board, being in the back of the car.



Tattoos (miliah) remembering of narrative.

Needs to be real. (deleting contacts) Physical acts.



Q and A with Parents! Very honest. Without being self-indulgent.



Merging mediation and documentation separating the re-configuring them. Exploding them into one. Video/tape/props. Taking a scene and exploding the different elements. Loss of content because of our 'documentation'.



'If you could say one thing what would you say?'



Recording the audience's information.



Write 3 things, which we would like to see in a scene that can be exploded.



Dissertation Meeting (Tuesday 28th October)

Ø Playing with chance. Playing with dice.

Ø Dice on stage.

Ø Performance premeditated by chance, or done on stage.

Ø Creating material by chance.

Ø John Cage Chesspiece.

Ø Is this giving us structure?

Ø Exploding scenes.

Devise a system that incorporates chance.

Ø Material coming from chance.

Ø Documenting,

o Sacred events.

Ø 4 = write a monologue.

Ø 6 = put it in a shredder.

Ø Audience rolling the dice.

Ø Exploring different types of systems,

Ø Sourcing an influence.

Ø Does that constitute performance?

Ø Words,

o Speech/scene.

o Controlled by dice.

o Editing,

o Reshuffling found text.

Ø Movement,

o Interaction.

o In space and with each other.

o A system that dictates how performers move with each other and within the space.

Ø Task,

o Task-based.

o Objects.

o A system to control how performers navigate around a series of object based tasks.

Ø Dictionary based,

o Creating new words.

o Creating new sentences.

o A system to generate text.