PARIP 2005

International Conference | 29 June - 03 July 2005

Bodies in Flight

Jones, Simon | UK

Plenary session abstract:

IMAG[IN]ING THE VOID:

THE PRACTICE-AS-RESEARCH PERFORMANCE WHO BY FIRE

WHO BY FIRE is the latest incarnation of a long-term practice-as-research project entitled Flesh & Text, undertaken by collaborators Sara Giddens [choreographer] and Simon Jones [writer], co-directors of the performance company Bodies in Flight.  It is made in collaboration with the band Angel Tech, commissioned by BAC Opera 2004 and funded by Arts Council England.

Although the company was formed in 1989 to provide a framework for the professional performance work of its members, this specific research topic was formulated in 1996 with their eighth show – Do the Wild Thing!  Since then each work has been an ongoing exploration of what the collaborators consider to be the fundamental experience of the performance event: the encounter of flesh with text, the annunciative instant of words embodied, bodies worded.  Here text is taken to be any discursive field, so, whilst all works have expressed a relation between choreographic, musical and verbal languages, more recent shows have introduced video and digital media, each with their own techniques and technologies.  Here performance is understood as the intensive event of an interrogation of this encounter between bodies and languages, essentially matter and minds.  As research, it is seen, in its ephemerality and refusal to submit to commodification, as a profound challenge to dominant forms of knowledge-making in the academy today.

The current concerns of “the void” in relation to “the image”, the point of realization of an image in performance, and the relationship between textures and texts, foregrounds and backgrounds, focus and blur, emerge from the trajectory of earlier works in this series.  Thus Who By Fire began at the point at which skinworks – the previous show – ends: with the mood of disorientation that follows a long session of surfing the web, the feeling of having followed one’s desires to some limit of exhaustion.  We began by exploring the possibilities of realizing this mood, which we equated with death, in performance: was it possible to imagine and then realize what was by definition beyond imagination, that which followed desire – death?  Through attempts to stalk this impossibility on stage, we started to explore the ways in which an image, whether sonically or visually, forms in performance: the sensation of material coming together – the pre-image; the recognition of the image itself; and then the after-image.  A concern for the experience of different generations figured here: in that the material works within a tension created by a recording of 18-month-old twins holding a pre-verbal dialogue the one with the other in their bedroom before sleep, and another recording of a performer in her late seventies singing a song.  The former is full of the delight of being on the point of acquiring the beginnings of a mastery over language; the latter full of the fretful self-recognition that one’s voice will no longer hit the notes that it once could.  The show itself is positioned between this coming to mastery and this leaving mastery, the one in innocence, the other in experience.