What The Matter Is

I don’t know how it happened, but nothing went wrong yesterday. Nothing broke, no-one was late, nothing got lost. After all the months of planning it would have almost been an anticlimax had the performance not caused ACTUAL DELIGHT.

It caused delight to me, and, to more of my delight, I think it caused delight to other people too. People smiled and double-took and laughed and a bunch of passing men retraced their steps and burst into song. Other people didn’t notice there was anything odd happening, others looked up and didn’t react, one or two people skidded under the sight line of the cameras and tried to avoid it altogether. The aeroplanes, the road drills, the slow boat reflected in the window panes, the trains on the bridge and the sirens on the opposite bank – they all carried on as though nothing was happening.

–

Yesterday’s performance on the South Bank is something I’ve been planning for some time, and I’ve been talking about it with Anthony Weeden for the past few weeks. Anthony is the conductor who was performing, and his job was to observe everything around him and conduct it like an orchestra. As I wrote here on Tuesday, it’s an impossible task if you take it literally: the conductor authors the movements of the environment while the environment authors the movements of the conductor.

The quality of the task’s impossibility is something we worked through together in conversation and largely, for me, during the rehearsal for a concert he was conducting. By piecing together correlations in our respective disciplines we gradually distinguished what would and would not be practically and musically appropriate.

I left Anthony at his podium to check the cameras back down on the riverbank, and when I next looked up he’d become a conductor. It had begun. The speculative private gestures he’d been testing out while we were talking had become the real thing. And in the same move, everything present silently shifted into synchronicities of themselves, more often than not (to begin with at least) quite unaware that they were being choreographed from above.

There’s lots more to think about here, and many possibilities for restagings and developments. I’ve invited Anthony back for an event at SE8 gallery in May, though we’re aware that it will be a very different work in a designated art space.

I’ll try to upload a short video of this first performance in the next week or so.

It was a very happy surprise to find Isaac Muñoz had selected this blog as a ‘choice blog’ for the month! The description in his article of “the grammar of things”, which “is there to be played with”, brings to mind a project I’m currently putting together in preparation for my MFA show in July; a project that also relates methodologically to the circular quality of my work Isaac explained as “the act of finding the way of her practice is her practice”.

Here’s where I’ve got to with the project so far:

Tomorrow afternoon I’m going to the South Bank to direct an outdoor performance for a solo orchestra conductor. ‘Direct’ is probably the wrong word. The idea for the work began as my own, but it’s the expertise and sensitivity of the conductor himself that will make the performance effective. I think it’s well and truly become a collaborative project over the past month, which has been vital since I’m delving into musical discourses that are quite new to me.

My initial ‘direction’ was that the conductor observe the people and things moving around him and conduct them as though they were an orchestra. It’s a proposition that’s impossible to literally put into practice, and so his work will be to watch, pre-empt, and very speedily react to whatever goes on around him, so that he appears to be conducting it all.

What interests me is the coexistent double image of a conductor authoring the movements of the passers-by, and the passers-by authoring the movements of the conductor. I’m developing this piece among a series of projects using diverse analogies for reader, writer and text: other analogies I’m trying are ‘text as line’, ‘text as machine’, ‘text as pivot’ and ‘text as handle’.

Tomorrow is the first time we’ll have performed the work, and after all the thinking through and theorizing, most of all I’m looking forward to the noise in the system: the many unpredictable points at which the analogy between text and conductor breaks down.

With this series of researches I’m keen to put the research into the hands of the practice. I can stare at the computer and edit my thoughts as much as I like, but only by going through with the performance – in all its particularities – can we hope to reach the bits that break down. And I’m sure it’s in the breakdowns that there are grains of chance for new thought.

Click here for Isaac’s original article

Click here for his blog