New Documentation

While reading through Tim Etchells' Certain Fragments I came to realise that its title did in all ways reflect its contents and style. It is a fragmented bundle of essays, writings and ideas. Basically the ideal book for me, as it allows you to choose from a lot of material easily and quickly without going into too much of academic issues for fifty pages that don't give any satisfaction as it's all about an ongoing research.

'That documentation of live events is an attempt at capture, a dragging down of the ephemeral into the fossilising mud of all that is fixed and fixing'
(p71)


While strongly agreeing to that concept, recognising the ephemeral qualities of live performance, I consider it necessary to keep track of one's work, and when one's work has to do with images, its documentation must be, at least partially, made of images. The documentation of work may be a starting point of collaborations and discussion and in no way does it actually represent a piece of performance.

So here are some photos taken yesterday, that document 'What you see is what you get?'. Some fragments of the show were 'replayed' live so as to get more quality stills than what was possible during the performances in December. 
Thanks to Jeanne Mirodatos, who was extremely dextrous at shining six torches at a time and to Giacomo Natali, who had worked with me for the performance, producing its soundtrack and assisting in technical matters.

Mannequin - Dress me up!

My next project involves the audience in a different way. I am asking them to bring clothes for me to perform in and the pieace will evolve around the indirect and yet very personal participation of spectators. Their clothes will be exhibited on stage, revealing each spectator's tastes, behaviour and ideas. After all, clothing always says something about us.

Butoh and miscellaneous

The Mime Festival London is an annual event that brings together performers from different backgrounds and practice. However, as the name suggests, it is not exactly theatre or performance that the festival deals with. Looking through their site while getting informed on what was on and what could possibly interest me, I got the feeling that this initiative was very close to the art of circus, which I did admire as a child. Of course with the fusion of different arts together it is difficult to define a piece by a single term, but when an element seems to take over by far more than the others, then we are bound to tag it as such and such.


One of the works that caught my attention (and mind you, it was probably the only one on the internet site that did not include a video trailer) was Kitt Johnson's Rankefod. One of the reasons why I went to see it was that the performance was a solo work and since I have been doing solos so far, I considered it useful to see how she handled it. Also I am fascinated by the Japanese Butoh dance and although I have just received some basic training in that field so far, there is much to learn by watching. 

Kitt Johnson gave a stunning Butoh performance, yet very personal. Rankefod explored the origins of species and the dancer's body went though a series of transitions, which, combined with fairly simple but effective lighting, created images that were somehow awkward in appereance and yet familiar in their organicism. The exploration of species, translated into by the body of the dancer, was certainly given more weight by the nudity of the body, which revealed all muscles and therefore the smallest movements were sensed by just perceiving the breathing of veins. Butoh dance is often performed without clothing, tending to concentrate the spectators' attention solely on the body, which is the protagonist of the piece. The body of the dancer assumes such a strong role that it would overshadow any other static objects or set design which are part of the performative space. 


But however empty the scene looked to us, certain light effects revealed the presence of a panel at the back of the stage. Although its texture permitted some versatility in the visual play of light I found that it did not fit with the blunt and powerful presence of the body, the white and homogenous texture of its skin. The fakeness of the panel was reveled at the end of the show when lights were switched on and it triumphed in all its kitch and heaviness. It became the backdrop for the after show discussion. I didn't ask 'Why this panel?' because  the interviewer annoyingly paraphrased the audiences' questions for the official recording of the talk. 


It was a very good dance performance despite the fact that stage settings did not quite work for my understanding of the relationship body-space. Kitt Johnson's long plait, even though understandably there for practical reasons, seemed very much like those magic tails in Avatar, which gave the sense of species in a broader context, making this small detail more meaningful than the crafty and cumbersome panel.

Ideas Progressing

As work is developing towards my next performance, here is a little construction I made at the wood  workshop yeasterday. By tomorrow it will become a container, another step of involving the audience in an unintrusive way.

dimensions: 90x40x80

Torchigraphing

Some of the first images from my photography work depicting objects lid by a torch. This project is part of my project proposal  submitted in January.
Torches come from my last performance 'What you see is wht you get?'

Art in a Van

Last weekend I enjoyed a nice day at Brixton Market in South London. Every place we go to has an aim to it and visiting a market usually implies shopping or dining, and if Brixton is the place, then dining would most probably include African and Caribbean cuisine. Well my aim for going there does indeed expresses my Italian side as I came to discover that the best pizza in London can only be found at the entrance of the market, precisely under the banner 'Franco Manca', but you won't miss it, queues are just as massive as the ones in the best pizzerias in Naples.

After a delicious Margherita I strolled around the market, looking at some of the peculiar products offered on sale; markets are always full of new and amazing things to get to know. And they are all there to explore without obligation to buy them and stuff your home with things in boxes, beacuse very often, that is where great bargains end up.


I came across an art initiative called Art in a Van. The installation on show that day was a small camera obscura, in which audience was invited and from where one of the shops could be spied on, with the upside projection of its image. 

What I liked about the work set up in that particular place was the drastic contrast between colours, movement and light outside and the dark room from which one could see the outside. Although the image could have been reinverted in order to look at it correctly, in my opinion, it was left upside down not only becasue of the poor materials and little space at disposal, but also to underline the fact that it is a 'mechanism' we looked through to see the shop infront of us. Once we came out the same view became (or just went back to) a completely different reality.


If you are interested to go and see it, it's on till the 11th of March and must be open the same hours as the market. I would advise that you don't leave the market without trying the pizza...

Versatile for Versatility's Sake

Recently a multidisciplinary performance with the curious name of 'Room Temperature Romance' was presented at the Barbican Pit Theatre. It was performed by two young dancer-coreographers and I considered it could be interesting for me mainly from a technical point of view.

What struck me as an audience member was the fact that everyone around me was eating and drinking prior to the show and when the performance started the noise of munching and slurping was transformed into giggles and laughter. Well it's great to be around happy people, but it almost felt like a little ritual to cover 'funny moments' rather than a natural reaction.

The performance was very stage centred, and there was the typical 'theatre' presence which drew the audiences' attention fully, for a whole seventy minutes, no interval. Eleni Edipidi and Bethanie Harrison showed off for spectators, keeping an eccentric behaviour on stage. Two girls lived in their fancy world of fashion and dreams on stage, thus making the barrier between performer and audience an important aspect of the piece, despite the performers' original statement, found on the leaflets outside the theatre, that said 'We encourage an intimate exchange between audience and performer'.

Fancy dresses, talking about boys, swinging on ropes, digital projections that somehow resembled MTV music videos and little IKEA lights that were randomly turned on and off were all part of a set design in motion that probably wanted to say too much and so couldn't keep a story running throughout. The Frida Kahlo-like painted eyebrows of the two performers immediately granted them more character, but after a while they didn't seem to have any meaning except underlining the constant presence of the performers on stage. The performance was based on appearances, and it was very narcissistic altogether, which is probably why I did not find it particularly original.

There were surely lots of ideas there , but they were scattered in a pattern that did not put them together to make a good whole, and even if the aim was to present a dispersive world of various aesthetic realities, it was not done with a consistency that justified its length. The final video projection was a documentation of the work in progress, which showed the performers trying on their fancy dresses and giggling for another five minutes, with subtitles and names, which seemed more of an excuse to have a video work on the wall rather than part of the piece.

Whoever may have the opportunity of seeing this award winning piece I wouldn't want to ruin them the ending, although this notion probably comes from watching cinema and not theatre. So I might as well go on by saying that the storming in on stage of dozens of soft toy pigs, with their own mechanism of moving legs and wagging curly tails was most probably the most interesting part of the whole piece and could have been a starting point for a new performance. As the audience got up to leave and was naturally drawn to go and see the litte pigs from closer, they were immediately stopped by staff as if they were attacking the dancers...intimate exchange?

New Year...Old Story? London and Snow

Happy New Year 2010!


I haven't updated my blog not due to the Christmas holidays (although they are always a nice break), but due to the fact that they coincided with writing our first term essays. It's been good to put together my ideas in a more formal context, so I am looking forward to feedback now.


As we are also preparing our portfolio to present on the 15th of January, right on Monday I started my normal school life. To my surprise, I soon found out that England is not in fact a country that can be found on a world map within the range of Northern Europe. Here, snow is a phenomenon that everyone fears, and  when it comes, people prepare for war. In fact, Wimbledon College of Art was closed its doors today, with no previous notice, and it seemed like a ghost building that has been empty for over 20 years. You could give the same judgement if you had the pleasure of staying in the MA studio the last couple of days and realised that the temperature was probably lower in there than outside. 

Well, let's see how this year goes! I am very satisfied with my work so far and also happen to have extremely creative and supportive colleagues. For the rest I haven't got mastercard, but we will make it work!

Live wins

I am extremely satisfied with the outcome of two weeks of hard work for my performance 'What you see is what you get?'. I presented it yesterday at the observatory of the college. It was designed for a limited number of people, so I did it twice, which was a good way of testing my audience.


My interest was in involving the audience in a non intrusive manner, and yet make them question their way of seeing and looking at things, putting under careful examintation their vision and other senses, such as smell, touch and taste. That is why I decided on using no lighting whatsoever, handing everyone a small torch in the beginning of the performance, when everyone was sitting in stark darkness (it did take a while to make sure there were not streaming lights from outside or all the equipment used for the piece) not really sure of what was to happen next.

It was great doing the performance twice, because audiences responded differently, changing slightly the timing of what is seen and when, which was a clear demonstration of the autopoietic feedback loop (the exchange that happens between performer and audience). Also, audiences varied slightly in number, which changed the amount of lighting avilable:less people equals less torches.


It was clear to me that I was taking a risk giving around all these torches and letting people play with them, but it is also true that I had a very sensible audience. It was interesting to be influenced by the light from the flashlights they used and yet maintain the rhythm I had previously worked on and calculated also keeping to the soundtrack that was created especially for this performance.


What I find most stunning about working with the dark, as opposed to light, is that the other senses are induced to work more, and the audience is put in a position of finding out what the best way to 'see' is. In my effort of putting together some video clips of the documentation of the performance, I find that it is extremely hard to understand what the piece was about. If one was not there, it is almost impossible to understand what happened on stage and how it evolved. Although I am sorry not to have a good recording of it, I realise that the impossibility to document it properly means that it is a piece that makes sense when performed live, and since live comes before mediatized for me, both as the performer and director of the piece, I am very happy with the final result. I got some very valuable feedback from spectators and would definitely like to present the piece again, and why not in another venue.

What you see is what you get?

My role plus your role equals our role minus...

It had been a while since I read so much academically. I am reading a lot of material that will inform both my practice and theoretical writing for this year. Although I am always very critical to my work and how I carry out a certain project, which can sometimes become a major cause for procrastinating the realisation of ideas, I feel that in studying certain aspects of performance I am becoming more conscious of not only the aesthetics of performance but also the complex relationship spectator-audience.


I have been reading the Emancipated Spectator, by French philosopher Jacques Ranciere, which explores the changing role of the contemporary specatator. The active spectator, as opposed to the more traditional, passive one, is not new to us, but Ranciere's approach, I believe, also examines the parameters of passivity and activity in the spectator. My interest in this topic is 'fed' by the fact that a lot of performance works nowadays involve the spectator in a such a way, that he becomes not only part of the performance itself, but sometimes the protagonist. In this role reversal it is not only unclear who is who, but in my opinion, it is unfair that a performance is directed by so an and so. If the spectator is in the centre of attention, then we have an event that has been created following someboby's idea, it is not directed. And why do we have to pay to see a performance if we are just going to be conducted through a workshop? I find workshops an amazing source of ideas, information and self-formation. But I do believe that sometimes the terms attributed to performance may be misleading for spectators. And for the time being, I am very far from the notion that spectators are necessarily passive if they do not do something, but rather watch a performance from their seats, be it in theatre or in a less conventional space.


This is why I feel it's necessary to explore these issues further. It will surely help me understand better how I can keep my audience active and at the same time maintain the distance that separates audience from performer, which is what actually differs performance from real life.


And talking about the stage and real life, I recommend the book Mimesis, by Matthew Potolsky, a wonderful overall account of how the term mimesis has applied to fields as literature, performance and cultural studies throughout time, exploring theories that range from Plato to contemporary thinkers.

Physical Work

This week some of us spent a day at the wood workshop to construct some furniture for the rooms of the three hour piece we are doing on the 18th. It was indeed a very productive session and I think we did a great job.


Although I studied and practised Fine Art for so many years, at some point I realised it didn't fit my personality and was merely a tool for my work, rather than a final product that communicates my ideas. But what I most miss from painting and sculpture is the manuality that there is to it. Getting into theatre-dance and performance allows me to work within spaces, in different aspects, and although I do a lot of physical exercise for dance, I always miss the physical work that's involved in crafting. 


Last weekend I visited the Open Studios Art Show at Wimbledon: two warehouses turned into artis's studios, more than a hundred painters, sculptors and ceramicist.  It was nice to see so many artists together, exhibiting their work in their tiny studios that had turned into small galleries for the event. In a way, I wished I was like one of those artists, with my little studio, painting away for as long as i wish. But I also perfectly know that this just doesn't suit me, so I figured out that what I miss is the manuality of making something, even if the product is not the piece that would communicate with the audience.


So what better way to fix this dilemma by making my own props? 


We had fun and obtained good results. Can't wait till next time! (I don't mean 'Come to me if you need some fixtures and fittings')

Time Piece

Here is the video of the performance we created in occasion of David Gale's workshop in October.


You can find further info on the workshop here and here.

I am the director!

For our second joint project (The Weighting Frame), I was to work with a colleague of mine for one of the four rooms,precisely the one that has Insignificance as a main theme. Well the collaboration didn't really take place at all,as she dropped off the course. So I was left on my own. Now I am directing the piece myself, which is even more challenging. I will be the only performer in the space, and with the help of our talented lighting team the Insignificance room will be quite minimal and yet some actions are going to take place. The duration is three hours, quite a while we have at our disposal. I imagine the whole piece to be some sort of an installation-happening,where the line between theatre and performance art is almost inexistent.

One out of four is good

Firsts is an amazingly versatile festival for young and emerging artists that takes place annually at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. Beautiful place, smart initiative and last but not least, great prices for poor students. It is a tough job choosing what to see in London: no doubt there is always the embarassment of choice, but you know there is also a high risk of ending up in a naff show, with a touch of obvious, unvoluntary amateurism and bad taste. Well the risk is worth taking anyhow.


On Tuesday night there were four performances presented, and for me one of them definitely stood out by far from the rest for professionally carried out work and attention to detail.


Finnish Ilona Jäntti, aerialist, presented Elsewhere, a short performance that combined aerial dance with video animation. Although simple in structure, the piece was visually very interesting and complete, the body language of the dancer and the video became the protagonists of the story. It showed that the animator (Tuula Jeker) had closely worked with Ilona during the creation of the work, so that the two elements fused perfectly together. Probably this is very often taken for granted in performance, but it's seldom that you see a performance where elements of different nature (for example 3D and 2D) are combined in a smart way, where they make sense together, even though different media is used in different ways.

The attention of the relationship between video and body reminded me of the work I did with Collettivo Almagesto in the past year, and it's definitely something to continue researching on.


Firsts was on for several nights, and each one offered a few short performances. Quarter to half hour really seems the best duration for a performance. You are sure to have the audiences' attention. If you go over that you really need to have something extraordinary to show to keep spectators satisfied (if you wish).


I would love to participate in Firsts 2010 and as this year we are embarking on a number of different projects at Wimbledon, who knows, maybe the VLP group could be on stage at the Royal Opera House next year...

Gift 1 - Dinner for a fox

Here is the video I created for Tim Jeeves' workshop that looked at different points of view on what gifts represent.
Turn up the volume since youtube's compression has reduced it somehow.

Dance, blindness and a change of roles

Although I have been fascinated with blindeness lately, as I think of my small project to present in December, together with my project proposal and critical practice paper I have started asking myself how I actually want to incorporate blindness into my work. I am not interested into representing a story or a fairytale about blindeness. I guess that the subject itself is a complex one to touch upon in performance and visual arts, where meaning is brought about by the spectator's interpretation of visual and verbal language.

However I am determined to find a way in which to propose blindness within the performative space, where the audiences' eye sight might be challanged. In the meantime I came across an experimental dance performance choreographed and conducted by Berlin based dancer and choreographer Felix Ruckert in 2002. 

Secret Service invited the audience to become the centre of a performance piece where dancers blindfolded the audience from the very beginning and led them through a long journey of exploring their body language. The piece consisted of two parts. The audience was introduced to the rules of the piece, blindfolded and led into the performance space by the dancers. From there on, they were to trust their 'guide', their senses, their body impulses. The second part involved taking off clothing and pushing the body to other limits, which doesn't particularly interest me at that point.

What I find interesting about this piece is that it put the audience at the centre of the performance (although credits are given to the dancers that conducted the 'spectator-performer' into the space) and the total privation of seeing, which put the spectators in a position to entirely trust people they don't know.

The originality of the concept of Secret Service lies in the fact that spectators were basically treated as amature dancers. So I imagine this piece very much as a workshop, a trait that I find is becoming more common in performance nowadays. Is this a way of bringing the spectator closer to the performer, making the work more widely accessible and responding to the ever growing needs of spectators to be on equal terms with the performer? Where does  a performance stop being one and becomes an open workshop?

Lines line up space (Tate Britain)

Last Saturday I went to see the Tate Britain. Of course Tate Modern is the 'coolest' one, and I love dropping by any chance I get. But fortunately, living in London obliges you to visit all the galleries possible. It was great seeing the original 'Ophelia', which was an obvious inspiration to Nick Cave in the nineties for the video of the song 'Where the wild roses grow'. Also I enjoyed some pieces by James Abbott McNeill Whistler, whose work I had only seen in books and on the net. Of course some of the symbology of 16th century British painting seemed quite curious to me as opposed to Italian Renaissance, with which I am much more familiar.

 

At the moment the Duveen Galleries house a massive site specific installation by Eva Rothschild, called Cold Corners. Twenty-six  black triangles of various sizes, made of light black aluminium tube, stretch out the whole length of the gallery. Almost looking like a refined scaffolding, the piece contrasts with the architecture of the space, creating a new space that can be explored from different points of view. The space seems 'outlined' by the black tube triangles, giving the gallery a system for measuring and perceiving chunks of space. The spectator's gaze is directed by these lines and when a 'cold corner' comes along, it seems that we change the direction we are looking in.

Eva Rothschild's work  reminded me of a set design technique that Richard Foreman describes in his book 'Unbalancing Acts'. In order to decentralise the spectator's look in one point, which is often the presence of a protagonist, he used pieces of string that accompanied the spectator's gaze to different directions on stage. I found this little detail of great interest as very often playrights tend to concentrate the spectator's attention in one centre point, where the drama takes place. Foreman escapes from this conventional idea by offering the audience to explore the actors' space in different light.


Many artists nowadays use string, plastic, metal and all kinds of materials to draw physical lines in galleries. Some works may be stunning (also due to their dimensions), I saw a huge installation of that kind at the Venice Biennale this year. It has become some sort of 'string fashion', or 'string style art' that may be a little over the top. But if there is a reason behind it, and it works within an exhibition space or a performative venue why not?

Show and Go

Our brief shows last Wednesday with David Gale went quite well. It was a great challenge to set up everything in a couple of hours, with the anxiety of taking it all down on time to return all the equipment we had borrowed.

I think all pieces had more or less the same duration, about five minutes. It's amazing how different all four performances were, and yet David really found that we had all worked very well as a team, and that all pieces had something in common.

What we could not have and so did not make use of is lighting. I am sure that our pieces would have been better with a more careful choice of lighting, but in that case we did not have the equipment required, as we were not using the theatre space and also had too little time to try things out. That of course made it easier to make up some creative, low cost techniques. I was happy to use the overhead projector once more, a great device that can be transformed into a very versatile light source. I had the pleasure of learning how to use those with  theatre director and visual artist Fabrizio Crisafulli, whose innovative work is   appreciated both in Italy and worldwide.

Another technical question in our piece was the video, and as in every performance, things started going wrong minutes before the presentation. But this is a must in theatre, so I guess it brings good luck. It all went smoothly in the end. David's remark about blindness regarding my part of the video (the moving images seen from a train window) reminded me of a patient described in Oliver Sacks' 'The man who mistook his wife for a hat'. A great book by the renowed neurologyst I read some years ago, it is a collection of some amazing short stories that deal with the complexity of our perceptions. The patient I recalled is Ingrid (and I remember the name because this is what I called my bicycle at the time), whose brain perceived images as frames, and although her eye sight was not damaged, she was unable to see continuous, moving images, but rather scattered fragments, like thousands of photograhs recording a singular movement.

Our performances were all recorded, and as soon as I get the chance to edit the videos I will put them up.

A One Week Project

Last Wednesday we had a workshop with Dave Gale in the filming studio space, and after a brief talk we were aked to individually write three different parts of three different stories. It was something I hadn't done before, but it was a challenge. I had two hours to create a beginning, a middle and an end for three different stories.

Mr. Gale talked about Jean Luc Goddard's idea of cinema: according to him, all stories had to have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order. I accidentaly saw a short film by Goddard the other day, and noticed that although the story was very simple and it didn't really lead anywhere, it was broken roughly into three parts. 

Before lunchtime we were split into groups by a random draw of names (which actually appeared  to be the most confusing part of the whole meeting) and we were asked to create a small play for next Wednesday (that is the day after tomorrow).

I happened to be working with Ilka and Marouso, and we have a beginning, a middle and an end. Any combination of the three could have come up (for example, two middles and an end, or a beginning and two ends). Our stories somehow conneceted, and although we seem to have quite a cinematic feeling for the whole thing, we hope to make a good multimedia performance.

We've been working on some video pieces and have the final storyboard for the whole performance. 

This is my middle of the story, it's about two men playing cards on a train. It took me the least time to construct and it's quite senseless. Well, it's only part of the story... If put in the right context it will work!

Showing not in Little Britain

It's been an intense Friday at Wimbledon College today, happily concluded by a nice get together at the nearby pub. Got to say that British pubs can be quite dull and sad, but if you are with the right company they start looking almost cosy and inviting. 

Today we had the lecture theatre booked for the afternoon to use as a performance and exhibiting space, where to show our work to anybody who is around and willing to walk in and have a chat. I found that a great idea and was looking forward to it. It got most of us working really hard to be able to put something up on time, and it was great seeing everybody experimenting and bringing things in.

As regards to my piece I was quite unsure what type of work I should propose. So far I have been reading and writing a lot, accompanied by some sketches and photographs. Exhibiting these would be really lame, as they are just some elements that support my research, but are not quite right to present as a 'sample' of my work. As my interest has shifted from the 'visual' to the 'non visual' or more pricisely to the 'not seen', I asked myself which direction do i take next? Is blindness a theme that I want to use in my work, or is it that certain condition which obliges individuals to use their other senses to the fullest that I want to suggest to the audience? This is why I first thought of a slide show storyboard for a small part of Orhan Pamuk's 'My name is red'. But while sketching I realised it was not the right thing. So if I was to take my 'blind' ideas further, i need to put it into practice. I decided to blindfold myself for an hour or two and 'explore' the works of my colleagues using my other senses, considering essential dialogue. I spent a while to find a simple ribbon to use for the blindfold, so as not to look like a performer who's on about showing something off. It was really to be part of my research. 

While everyone was preparing their work to be taken upsatairs, in my effort of not looking around too much before my 'perception exploring', I was doing some experiments with a small torch, trying to create only a small dot of light. I tryed putting on 'blinds' on the glass bit of it, with tiny holes, but the effect was still that of the diffusing light that a torch normally has. That's until I got Esteban to have a look and he suggested I make a long cone, attach it to the torch and then block it with a 'blind'. Great, it worked! But the torch didn't look like a flashlight anymore, it was half a meter long and looked like a small kalashnikov. Looking through the small hole on the blind with the light on, it created a really nice tunnel effect, so I made a black paper container for it, through which people can look. It wasn't gonna take long, and it was something I could show as well. While finishing it off, I was surprised by my colleagues who announced that we don't have the space which had been booked for us. Quite literally we had been kicked out, and for this kind of school and standards that is unacceptable.

Where things went from there is something I will go back to in another post. Good thing was we had a new group meeting to discuss our priorities and needs as students who are part of Wimbledon College. For as much as this country has hit us with a culture shock, it's good to know where we stand.

This is where the magic happens! And it's a miracle as well, just picture nearly 16 of us there making performance in that space...

Ant

While writing 'insignificant' for the picture of the previous post, while not having space to fit it the whole word on one line I had to take a second one for 'ant' and just realised that an ant does have to do with insignificance. Not that ants are insignificant to our world, but for their size, they are (and probably would feel, if they could feel like us) quite insignificant, as opposed to the sizes and dimensions of our (in/human) world.

Insignificant timing

These days things are happening faster than what I can realise, let alone write about. But in the effort of keeping the blog updated according to 'VLP regulations' I might as well start by intruducing the new project we are working on.

There is already a new joint project our group is working on, and it's been less than a week that we finished the climate change projection. This obviously doesn't leavs us with much time for our individual research, but it's a great way of training not only your flow of ideas and technical possibilities, but also your way of coping with so many things at the same time. It is not easy working on a few projects altogether and running after tight deadlines without mixing concepts and at the same time keeping a high level of professionalism.

'Insignificance' is one of the four themes we are to develop on a performative level for a show taking place in December. It is only two of us working on that one, so it's another kind of collaboration, probably a more complicated one. When you work with many people you know you are bound to give up on some ideas and embrace others, while if you only got one partner then it's harder to hold back  what you might not agree on.

Probably 'Insignificance'  is the most difficult of all four themes not becasue of what it means (or doesn't mean) but of the context we are to put it in: performance. The whole act of performing is about communicationg an idea, however simple it may be, but when you are to communicate something that is insignificant itself that becomes a challenging task. Maybe also due to the fact that insignificance is a realtive term: what is significant to me might be totally insignificant to somebody else, and things assume their 'insignificance' in relation to place, time and taste.

The first thing that came to mind, considering we are to perform, was the repetition of a simple routine movement. Not particularly complex movements, if repeated over and over again tend to lose their meaning and purpose somehow. They say that 'practice makes perfect', or that 'repetition is the mother of knowledge', and that would completely prove me wrong, but in theatre, where  timing is to be taken into consideration (say a show has a duration of thirty minutes for example) I, as part of an audience, would expect some kind of development or plot to unfold. If a performer raises their hand and then drops it, for half and hour, repeating always the same exact movement, doing nothing else, I would have no doubt that the only thing that he is trying to say is that he doesn't care. And that goes quite close to insignificance. 

Another idea was to try and make a list of insignificant things we do every day. But I guess we make the best of our time, isn't it? We do insignifiact things, but that's only becasue the others notice them, they are not insignificant to us.

My work partner suggested we take a picture every day, at the same time, and then look at them later on together. That seemed like an interesting idea, but I thought that setting a certain time for taking a photo would actually give us time to think about what we photograph and so give a mening to it. I suggested  that we carry our cameras with us and call each other randomly, just saying 'Take a pic!'. This would definitely be taking pictures of unexpected things and it's also fun. It surprised me that this seemed probably a bit invasive to her, however we exchanged numbers and will give it a shot. 

Let's see where it takes us.

Distortions

Few days ago I came across an excerpt from an eighty's Japanese tv show by, although still not at the time, great film director and versatile artist Takeshi Kitano. He had the idea of playing with people's vision in relation to their body movements and reactions. Even though we must bear in mind that it was originally created for tv entertainment, the video shows the artist's interest in the deformation of human vision. 

What he did was organise a football game, where players simply had to wear a pair of binoculars. Over twnty years after its release, this video is great fun!

An essay on blindness

As I have been currently interested in blindness, more precisely by its different interpretation by non blind authors, I remembered another novel I'd come across a few years ago- Blindness, by Portugese author Jose Saramago.

It tells the story of an imaginary city hit by a blindness pandemic, progressively afflicting all its inhabitants and leading to a major social breakdown. Although I found Saramago's style too descriptive and explicit, the story really put me in a position to imagine what life would be like if we all started losing our eye sight one by one. Consequences would be way beyond simply not seeing the outside world.