background: Michelle Williams

Susana, I had no clue that you were a serial communicator, that you spent your time constructing links with strangers. I wish I had known this about you before. I'm glad that you mentioned this because I feel we can derive so much of the performer that exists in us today from our childhood actions.

I was never so bold, but I did spend a great deal of time lying under armchairs and sofas, remaining very still. I'd lie flat on my back and concoct relationships from those I knew together with an imaginary entourage. We would play and live out a mix of dramatic, romantic and mundane encounters under that sofa while I remained static.

As an aside, the need to talk and communicate has always been important. At 18 I had my own radio show, albeit at the local hospital. I liked the idea of talking in a space where it was a matter of life and death. (This comes with a preoccupation with Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's 1947 film classic of the same name)

I would have to enter the belly of the hospital which was covered in pipes and littered with wheelchairs and broken beds to play music requests to elderly patients. There were times I was convinced nobody was listening, but somehow this did not matter. The idea of my voice being carried into headsets around the building sustained me. Perhaps I love the sound of my own voice.

This aside, my background is in performance. My early works in the main dealt with physical presence made present by my voice. Like you Susana, I found it important to have intimate audiences to talk to. I would recite elaborate monologues often explaining physically destructive acts against my body. Often the theme was falling, hurting my knees but getting up again to try again. Writing this now I realise that there was a real lack of physicality (rather like my prone state under the sofa as a chid). When I did deal with my body, it would often be place myself within an environment. To fit my body into it, in such a way that the environment and I became two separate entities made for each other.

I left London in 2003, I moved to Amsterdam and lived there for 3 years. It was in Amsterdam that my work shifted from me to other individuals. I became a documentary maker, while juggling my video work, documentary films began to take over. It was always a guilty secret, but one I can reconcile myself now.

My interest in the lives and position of my subjects was really linked to storytelling. Storytelling has always been important to me. Filming other people was a highly voyeuristic process that I enjoyed. I offered those who participated in my films greater autonomy (through sharing the editing process) or a blank canvas to “perform” to camera, believing that my eradicated presence was still implied by the movements of the camera or my voice off screen. While I still maintain that filmmaking is in itself performative, this process is undoubtedly more passive than being in front of the camera.

I also enjoy the performance of bodies in internal and external environments. For many years now I have filmed people through windows, hours of footage of people living in their homes. Its terrible but I can't help watching their gestures from long range. I don't know why I'm confessing this all to you, but somehow its all linked.

My documentary work is now finding new routes into a feature length fiction film: Mère Folle, which I am co-directing with cultural theorist Mieke Bal.
Please check out: http://www.crazymothermovie.com/index.php

Coming back to the idea of a lack of physical presence, things have changed recently. I have just started to put myself back in front of the camera, to come out of hiding. No doubt we will discuss this in the symposium. It is an important step for me. Perhaps it's something I felt that was important as a younger performer. The moment of putting yourself on the line and risking something in the live context.

I'm still thinking about your impromptu phone calls Susana. I have a confession that sometimes in the PhD seminar, I open my mouth and I have no clue what I'm going to say. I do it to myself in an attempt to shoot myself in the foot, to look foolish for the sake of it, to see if I can salvage my position. I think I've scraped through, but you'll know now when I haven't. I think failing is key, and the potential of embarrassment and what you do in the aftermath is something that is at stake for me in the live moment.