Sharon Hayes as “Placeholder”

This weekend I had the opportunity to get to know artist Sharon Hayes a bit.  I’m interested in the way her work with speech, protest, history and the public assumes different things about the possibilities of performance than proscenium dancing.

reading 36 "Addresses to the Nation" of Ronald Reagan

Among other things, her work enacts history through performance of historical texts and images.  This performance is not acting, and not recreacting a historical moment, but “enacting” the past by reading text.  This opened up many possibilities for me in framing performance in any future work in the vein of Afferent Data as well as the movement choirs.  I connected with her attitude towards herself in her work –she called it being a “placeholder” between the past and the present, for many reasons.

In working on Afferent Data with Joshua, we had a difficult time understanding exactly what we were doing by having me “perform”  piece.  Actually, we settled on the word “demonstration” to describe what we were doing, which feels a little more accurate.  To summarize, the piece took place in the Strength of Materials Lab at Ohio State, a room approximately 25 X 30 feet, divided along the middle by a chain-link fence.  One side of the fence was an 8-channel sound environment – 8 sets of speakers evenly spaced along the periphery.  I stood on the other side of the fence, under a single bulb.  Through a video camera and jitter I controlled the timing of sound on the other side of the fence which had been processed in a number of ways.  The raw material for the sound also came from a recording of my breath.  I stood breathing, and the sound changed slowly over the course of 20 mintues.  The sound environment created on the other side of the chain link fence was immersive and texture-based.

Questions about performance arose out of the offering of this piece for me.  We struggled with whether to call it a performance or not because we were not interested in me expressing anything or acting “as if” anything.  However, calling it a “demonstration” and then placing me under a light on the other side of a fence posed challenges.  I found it difficult to look at people and breathe for 20 minutes without filling my actions, and my face with emotional content.  I think what we wanted was a sense of bareness, transparency, and readability; we wanted people to see me and say, “oh, she’s breathing, and that’s connected to the sound I’m hearing.”  I wanted there to be a particularly strange and visceral connection between the sight of the breath and the sound.  What I did not understand how to deal with was the primacy of the visual and the weight of standing in front of others doing actions.  I have performed a lot, and found it so difficult to do the task without dramatizing it, or trying to make it something more than it was.  I’m still not sure, was I trying to make it something more because the idea was just too minimal and I was intensely aware of that in the moment?  Or did my urge to make it something more come out of my background as a proscenium performer and a human reluctance to be seen, to be transparent?  I may not need to answer these two questions definitively in order to continue to develop this work.

I can’t seem to come across a big idea these days without relating it to movement choirs.  (Is that the curse of being in graduate school?  Absolutely everything connects to your research?)  I’m now reevaluating the insider/outsider relationship as well as the way I identify the performers of the choir.  If I do physically recreate a choir, I’d love to see the movers as enacting the movements in the score without pretending to be the original participants.  How can the idea of “placeholder” inform this historic reconstruction?  Sharon seems to have provided me with a body of work that is an example of this cultural materialist framework I’m thinking about in reconstruction – the performance of a historic work being performative.

This also connects back to pocket scores. A basic assumption in my reconstruction of a choir is the choir’s relationship to its notation and vice versa.  The movements were made simple in order to be easily recorded and disseminated.  The notation system was developed in part to share the choirs with amateur movers.  It would be so against the rules to disseminated the actual score to onlookers, but what could I give or hand out at the performance of a movement choir that might somehow bring the passersby into insider status?