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.
Sunday 10 May 2009
Background: Véronique Chance
My background is also not in performance but in Fine Art/Printmaking and my interest in performance and performativity (and my interest in mediation for that matter) probably comes from the frustration l had for three years on a very traditional mono-disciplinary degree course at what was then Manchester Polytechnic.
At Manchester we were not ‘allowed’ to cross-disciplines and those that did had a very hard time or were punished with a lower classification of degree. I towed the line and tried to push the boundaries in my own way, by making large-scale works that required a lot of physical effort and which involved a process of piecing together prints in sections to make images the scale of theatrical backdrops. But I was not satisfied: by the time I finished the course I felt I had learned a lot of traditional printmaking processes and techniques, but very little else and even less of anything in a critical sense.
The year I had at Glasgow School of Art, immediately following my degree taught me far more than the three years at Manchester had done. Although still ‘taught’ under disciplines, the approach was far more open and multi-disciplinary, with the understanding of artistic practice being about an exploration of ideas and processes that come from a variety of sources and situations in everyday life (as well as from art), and an attitude towards the making of art that considered a more methodological approach. I was in a Printmaking department, but I could make objects, I could use photography and I could use text (and texts) in the making of my work. I could also make work that did not go on walls.
I’m not sure exactly when my relationship to Performance came about. I say relationship because that is what I consider my work to have- a relationship to performance rather than necessarily being a performance in itself and I have never called myself a performance artist (or any other kind of artist for that matter, although recently during my residency at the New Media Institute in Banff, I found myself using the term ‘media artist’ to describe myself, whilst at the same time being fiercely critical of the use of the term).
My relationship to performance is in some ways an uncomfortable one. I think this is because I was always petrified and self-conscious as a child of performing on a stage. I grew up in the environment of a small boys boarding school in Kent that my father taught in and I found myself on occasion (my father also being the English teacher), being coerced into playing small bit parts in school drama productions. My fear was not so much a fear of being on stage in itself, but a fear of the spoken word and particularly of forgetting my words, however few they were (and they were always very few), and of speaking out of turn or in the wrong place. So my relationship to performance has been more one of gesture and action, rather than one of utterance and one in front of a camera, rather than live.
My first attempt at a live performance came on the PhD in my second year, when wanting to describe the methodology of my practice in relation to the concerns of my research project in a seminar presentation. I have never been a big fan of ‘PowerPoint’ presentations in the discussion and presentation of art and I was trying to think of how I could make an alternative, but effective presentation that could throw up a number of questions that were central to my research concerns (namely the relationship between the physical presence of the body and its screen representation). I have also never been a big fan of reading out a presentation (although I have been guilty of this on several occasions, due to my fear of forgetting my words).
I began to think about my ‘method’ of practice (of performing in front of a camera) and how I might perform or ‘demonstrate’ this as a structural process. Mediation became a central to this, not least through act of bringing (or transferring) to a public arena what normally took place in the privacy of my studio, but also through the setting up of a live video feed that became part of the structure of the performance as a live event. In this (new) situation, the different ‘elements’ became props and characters, with the recording camera, a centrepiece of the event, through which all the elements connected and combined, in the position of the starring role. This strategy was designed to raise questions about the liveness of performance and its representation in a very direct way. It was also designed take the emphasis away from me as a performer, whilst also drawing attention to that very act.
The performance itself (as it would have been performed in front of a camera) was based on a simple exercise routine that I had practised and learned and that was to be performed on a silver exercise ball (the significance of the ball had to do with the idea of introducing a simple prop into a routine; the significance of the exercise routine, stems from my interest in the relationship between physical exercise, physical exertion, gesture and the repetitive act).
In a similar way to my fear of forgetting my words, I became fearful of forgetting the routine, but somehow the challenge of the event and the performance as one of physical gesture (rather than one of speech), made me overcome my nerves (no-one would ‘know’ the routine in any case).
I was also tickled by the very idea of performing an exercise routine on a slightly over-sized silver exercise ball in front of an audience.
I’ll leave it there…
At Manchester we were not ‘allowed’ to cross-disciplines and those that did had a very hard time or were punished with a lower classification of degree. I towed the line and tried to push the boundaries in my own way, by making large-scale works that required a lot of physical effort and which involved a process of piecing together prints in sections to make images the scale of theatrical backdrops. But I was not satisfied: by the time I finished the course I felt I had learned a lot of traditional printmaking processes and techniques, but very little else and even less of anything in a critical sense.
The year I had at Glasgow School of Art, immediately following my degree taught me far more than the three years at Manchester had done. Although still ‘taught’ under disciplines, the approach was far more open and multi-disciplinary, with the understanding of artistic practice being about an exploration of ideas and processes that come from a variety of sources and situations in everyday life (as well as from art), and an attitude towards the making of art that considered a more methodological approach. I was in a Printmaking department, but I could make objects, I could use photography and I could use text (and texts) in the making of my work. I could also make work that did not go on walls.
I’m not sure exactly when my relationship to Performance came about. I say relationship because that is what I consider my work to have- a relationship to performance rather than necessarily being a performance in itself and I have never called myself a performance artist (or any other kind of artist for that matter, although recently during my residency at the New Media Institute in Banff, I found myself using the term ‘media artist’ to describe myself, whilst at the same time being fiercely critical of the use of the term).
My relationship to performance is in some ways an uncomfortable one. I think this is because I was always petrified and self-conscious as a child of performing on a stage. I grew up in the environment of a small boys boarding school in Kent that my father taught in and I found myself on occasion (my father also being the English teacher), being coerced into playing small bit parts in school drama productions. My fear was not so much a fear of being on stage in itself, but a fear of the spoken word and particularly of forgetting my words, however few they were (and they were always very few), and of speaking out of turn or in the wrong place. So my relationship to performance has been more one of gesture and action, rather than one of utterance and one in front of a camera, rather than live.
My first attempt at a live performance came on the PhD in my second year, when wanting to describe the methodology of my practice in relation to the concerns of my research project in a seminar presentation. I have never been a big fan of ‘PowerPoint’ presentations in the discussion and presentation of art and I was trying to think of how I could make an alternative, but effective presentation that could throw up a number of questions that were central to my research concerns (namely the relationship between the physical presence of the body and its screen representation). I have also never been a big fan of reading out a presentation (although I have been guilty of this on several occasions, due to my fear of forgetting my words).
I began to think about my ‘method’ of practice (of performing in front of a camera) and how I might perform or ‘demonstrate’ this as a structural process. Mediation became a central to this, not least through act of bringing (or transferring) to a public arena what normally took place in the privacy of my studio, but also through the setting up of a live video feed that became part of the structure of the performance as a live event. In this (new) situation, the different ‘elements’ became props and characters, with the recording camera, a centrepiece of the event, through which all the elements connected and combined, in the position of the starring role. This strategy was designed to raise questions about the liveness of performance and its representation in a very direct way. It was also designed take the emphasis away from me as a performer, whilst also drawing attention to that very act.
The performance itself (as it would have been performed in front of a camera) was based on a simple exercise routine that I had practised and learned and that was to be performed on a silver exercise ball (the significance of the ball had to do with the idea of introducing a simple prop into a routine; the significance of the exercise routine, stems from my interest in the relationship between physical exercise, physical exertion, gesture and the repetitive act).
In a similar way to my fear of forgetting my words, I became fearful of forgetting the routine, but somehow the challenge of the event and the performance as one of physical gesture (rather than one of speech), made me overcome my nerves (no-one would ‘know’ the routine in any case).
I was also tickled by the very idea of performing an exercise routine on a slightly over-sized silver exercise ball in front of an audience.
I’ll leave it there…
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