We are used to producing theatre that is designed to remove us from ourselves. Theatres enable us, the audience, to sit and watch a representational relationship unfold at a safe distance, so that we might catch a fleeting glimpse of something inexorably linked to how we might live, but without uprooting and profoundly altering us. The theatre that takes place within theatre’s buildings and institutions can do little more than provide us with a detached perspective, a fictional distraction that sates us but doesn’t unduly disturb us. This experience of theatre is very unlike the ordeal undergone during a rite of passage by the tribal initiate, whose will is broken and rebuilt in ways that he or she cannot unravel.
My ultimate Performance is continuous and resides in the everyday.
The Performance will take us beyond the boundaries of self-imposed exile within the domain of purpose-built venues and into the streets and buildings and land we inhabit daily, where the entire field of human and biological interaction is to be viewed as a creative event.
To participate in The Performance, the participants need only sign their name into The Book, which will exist online. From this point, the performance begins. The participants now become both audience and performer, at once the observer and observed in a labyrinthine dance of perpetually moving bodies.
The Performance can commence anywhere one chooses, as it offers the contemplation of all experience in all its totality, where ordinary, banal, but sometimes extraordinary occurrences have the potential to reveal a narrative singularity, a point where our conscious awareness breaks down and unexpected possibilities are realised.
The Performance encompasses the peripatetic observation of the multiple, diverse planes of everyday existence, everything which at first sight seems insignificant, mundane, or even abject, volatile or explosive, organised or chaotic, or quiet and inconspicuous; moments in time which do not privilege any particular forms of expression or activity, and can occur with unlimited diversity. Every interaction has its own inimitable use of verbal language, its own temperature and colour, its particular rhythms and cadence, its own form and texture, a physical, emotional, rational, and unconscious expression that is unique to itself. The Performance is interactive and ever-changing; all events and things are recontextualised and reframed before unfurling into an ever-expanding horizon of meanings and unconscious responses.
Random conversations between strangers on a street corner, the obscure gestures people use to greet each other in public places, the way a person might turn away their eyes in embarrassment, or laugh at some obscure recognition, or peer through a shop window, or wait for a friend in a bar: The Performance elicits and intensifies a need for a theatrical exchange to take place, where something hidden reveals itself, or emerges unformed or in an unexpected shape, or is not there at all. It creates the conditions for the unconscious to flow freely through us.
The Performance takes place in the empty space between the plane of the ordinary and the un-nameable utopia.
The Performance ends when the participant writes their thoughts next to their name The Book.