Week 11 Action Lab 2 - Our Lady

Once I had worked out I was going to build on the piece recharging from Week 8 and the poem ‘skinless’ for the second Action Lab, I realised I had a lot of physical work to do.  I wanted to combine autobiographical, voiced, direct to audience material with a film that referenced my stay at Our Lady.  I decided to allude to domestic violence but coded in repetitive movement performed in front of video on the large film screen.  To get the movements crisp enough feel they represented what I wanted to say, I put in hours of rehearsal and felt grateful for my body remembering how to work hard.  

I was inspired by a section of Douglas Wright’s Elegy:

I reused some of the film I had shot at the Our Lady Hospital and had edited for Week 4. I combined it with the split screen, black and white film skin from Week 6 - images of the FADS lighting rig, inhospitable environments and the stills of my back to reinforce the vulnerability I had felt as a result of PTSD. I recorded a voice over of the more ‘difficult’ verbal content to contrast with the conversational tone at the start of the piece.  I bookended the audio on the video with an a cappella version of ‘Twinkle, twinkle little star’ - this has become a touchstone for me, or maybe an unnecessary security blanket.  The first visuals were old TV screens and a cassette recorder, images that are a metaphor for both ‘screening’ and ‘reliving/recording’ emotional content.

Using an iPad and iMovie was challenging to create the audiovisual content that I wanted but I got there in the end:

When I transferred the video to be able to project it from the mezzanine at a prearranged verbal cue it corrupted - we didn’t know this until it played and it worked really well.  
Serendipitous, surrealist gremlins.  
Thanks to the spirit of Leonora Carrington.

By this stage in the process of making performances I was wondering if my practice lay more at the live art end of the spectrum and I had to decided to take a risk and combine the rough texture of the large pine box in FADS with the vulnerable naked back as a physical representation of the ‘box’ I was meant to use as advised by one counsellor to enclose my feelings when they were overwhelming.  
Disrobing with my back to the audience I then stepped into the box and very slowly moved down into the vulnerable foetal position with a black screen, the poem skinless as a voice over, black screen and a ‘special’ side spot to cross illuminate the box.  Jules Deering, our ever helpful technician, helped work out the best angle for this. He also helped me work out the best wash for the beginning of the piece.  He got it immediately when I said, tongue only partially in cheek, that I wanted a feeling of Dave Allen crossed with Marina Abromovic.


Despite not being able to execute the dance homage to Doug Wright with quite the finesse I was after, this is the performance piece of which I am most proud.  It was very scary to do.


Reflecting on it now a few weeks later I have even enjoyed going over my choreography notes, verbal text and physical script. The process is as chaotic as ever, but this time the execution came closer to my imagined product: