Instability Strips
A week to go until our preview, next Tuesday 5/9 at 10pm! Things are getting pretty intense. We’ve been developing the piece in its current form since May this year, so the big decisions have pretty much all been made, but there are still dozens of smaller details to be sorted out and ticked off before we move into the theatre on Monday afternoon.
Work on what is now Instability Strip began when I asked what seemed on the surface to be pretty simple questions about perception and embodiment in performance. I was interested in exploring performance from the point of view of a female performer. What happens when a woman takes up a position as a performer, in relation to a real or imagined audience – what does she think she’s doing? What does an audience watching her see? And what’s the correlation between those perspectives?
I put those questions together with reflections on science, art and creativity, to generate a set of short but linguistically dense texts that could be used as the basis for vocal and physical exploration of the way watching and being watched works in the context of live performance. I wanted to keep a certain distance between the text, the speech and other sounds and the actions I performed on stage. I didn’t want the text to be impenetrable, but neither should it be too easy for watchers or listeners to reach a hard and fast conclusion about meaning, bypassing the need to pay attention to what is sensed rather than making sense – to elements of performance such as space and silence, the texture and rhythm of language or the body itself as mute flesh.
Sections of the text and some early ideas about performance presentation first saw the light in 2003, in a 20 minute performance research solo I presented at the Double Dialogues ‘Art and Pain’ conference at Melbourne Uni. Since then, I have tested out ideas and approaches here and overseas, mainly through presentations at conferences and seminars, but audiences at Theatre Works next week will see a greatly changed, substantially new and more polished work.
Well, the starting questions may sound simple but the situation they refer to isn’t simple at all. It’s been a risky – and painful – but exhilarating! exercise to make those questions active in different ways, while exploring the terrain they open up. I wouldn’t say I’ve got an answer but I hope our audience at Theatre Works will enjoy watching me – and the wonderful bunch of curious and talented people I’ve convinced to work with me - try to find out …
The piece works as a sort of jigsaw around these questions, a puzzle made with layers of language, images, music and movement clumping, floating around together and sometimes shooting off at odd angles in space and time. It has certainly grown and changed since 2003, with each person involved contributing new ideas and material. Some of those ideas have taken off in surprising directions, so sometimes it feels as if the piece has a life and logic of its own!
For instance, I had a strong feeling that a vocabulary drawn from Tango music and Tango culture would be a good anchor for the new elements I wanted to develop for this first public season, although when the idea first came to me I couldn’t have told you exactly why. The Tango has woven itself into and around threads already present in the text, webs of reference to the canon of Western classical and modernist art and literature, to the edifices and institutions of scientific and philosophical enquiry, to histories of colonisation and to the sorry record of casual inequity and conscious aggression forming the background against which feminist consciousness has emerged in the past century or so. It’s been fascinating to follow through on that hunch and, through the expertise and cultural knowledge of composer (and my fellow performer) Guillermo Anad, to discover the richness of Tango as a metaphor for encounters and disencounters in new worlds and old, within the theatre and outside it.
Then there is Guillermo’s character The Explorer and his relationship to a landscape which might be somewhere in Australia, or somewhere in South America … he does seem to bear more than a passing resemblance to Victoria’s first government zoologist, the wonderfully eccentric Wilhelm Blandowski, but I swear I knew nothing about the gentleman concerned before I wrote … spooky. Another metaphysical Tango encounter?
However we acquired them, the Instability Tango! concert on Saturday 9/10 at 3.30pm will give us a chance to introduce some of the ideas and influences behind the show, broaden the circle to include some of our other good friends and try out a couple of promising new ideas that, although not right for Instability Strip, just might turn into something exciting down the track … like Last Tango in Frankston, a voice piece for three women that I’ve been working on with Jackie Kerin and Faye Bendrups … love to see you all there.
Exploration through music has added so much to the way Instability Strip has developed this year. Today’s big excitement was listening to and signing off on the electronic soundscape by our other wonderful composer Natasha Moszenin. Natasha, Guillermo and I started music workshops in late May – Natasha’s 11 original tracks create an extraordinary set of atmospheres for the show to highlight and link individual sequences, while all the music you will hear played live in performance, has been composed by Guillermo.
I’m immensely grateful for the astute suggestions made by Yoni Prior as dramaturg throughout this development process. Her sustained input over many months has helped me to ‘see’ new possibilities and find fresh ways of putting existing and new material together. I can’t wait to see how the video sequence I shot a few weeks ago with cinematographer John Cumming will look in the theatre, when it’s meshed in with live action, Zoe Stuart’s costumes and design ideas, Bec Etchell’s staging inventions and Lucy Birkinshaw’s lighting!
And I can’t wait to see your faces when you … when I … What will you see, I wonder?
Alison Richards Melbourne 27/9/2010
