In other words

is the title for a performance project I've been working on for the past few months. Over the last two and a half weeks, we've been workshopping in a basement space at the old Abbotsford Arts Convent.This has been our first creative development for the work. And we are planning to produce it for next year, with another creative development in the pipeline for Feburary pending funding... (www.abbotsfordconvent.com)

Anyhow... I thought you might be interested in what I've been up to... especially the lawyers out there..
so heres the shpiel...


'In other words' is an investigation into the significance of storytelling within international truth comissions. It explores how various countries have provided a platform in which citizens can speak to their pasts. And in doing so, reconcile with their histories, their divided memories. (the idea is to explore international stories in order to point towards Australia's official lack of acknowledgement to it's past.)
Using slide projected portraits and landscapes, we have begun to explore how stories are constructions of memory, providing the storyteller with an identity in the moment of telling.

portraits and memories...
It has been important to acknowledge that the testimonies explored are not our personal stories, nor are they the actors, or the slide portraits. Rather, they represent the 'act of telling', the act of beccoming whole, of re membering - physically and metaphorically. The physical reconstruction of the portrait within performance acts as a metaphor for the significance of that moment.
But the ability to disfigure, deconstruct , fragment the image within performance speaks equally to the consequences and challenges that speaking these stories can bring.
I.e That often this kind of 'truth telling can 'open old wounds'.

landscapes and the invisible..
Inspired by the State terrorism in South America and the people who dissapeared, I was/am inspired by how people can become invisible. As if they have been swallowed up by the earth. I am also interested in how landscapes can hold their own memory. And how these memories can be accessed by investigating the 'traces' of the past left behind.


So there is my 'art speak' ...
here are the exciting ideas attached to the piece so far....

We're inside this space, that you can see above.. it's amazing, old and crazy, with its own sense of history. We're thinking of dividing the audience into three. Each group gets brought into the space via a small room inside the building. Each group acts as a witness to one story told differently by each actor. The actor uses that partiuclar story but inteprets it within a different slide portrait that is projected into a different space.

The audience is then moved into the main space. Prior to this, they have each been given a white shirt and asked to take their shoes off.
When they enter the main space, projected all around them, are images of landscapes and they walk onto red soil that covers the entire space. As they move through the space, they become part of the landscape as the image is projected onto them. They either highlight the landscape, if they are standing in front of a black wall, or become invisible and dissapear into the landscape, if they are in front of a white wall.
The idea is that they become part of a living installation.

Emerging out of the landscapes, come various testimonies, spoken by the three actors, sometimes simultaneosly, other times, one by one. But each time, spoken through a projected slide portrait, projected onto a particularly architecturally interesting surface.
i.e one of the images is projected into the chimney, and an actor is sitting inside the chimney, her white outfit acting as a screen for the projected image.

So there you go...
that's what I do all day.. figure out how to project light onto various surfaces and why I'm doing it...

and then I wonder if i'm going to be a very poor artist all my life, or if things will change...