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.
