Wednesday 27 May 2009

Table Manners origami paper



This is one of a couple of images I've just put up on our Flickr photostream from last week's performance project, Table Manners, devised with students of Contemporary Performance Practices at Leeds Met University.

The show was performed for 20 audience members at a time, all sat around a large U shaped work bench, and was structured as a series of one-to-one performance encounters across the table top, including etiquette instruction, drawing, dialogue scene, handwriting demonstrations and an origami lesson. The image above is the 'origami paper store', held in place by candles, positioned on a 'neat table' in the centre of the space. This centre table was partly inspired by the amazing Pile of Index Cards (PoIC) project/system, particularly this image.

The 20 solo performances happening at any one time began in sync, or as a group performance of a shared text, early on in the piece, but moved into individual responses to particular tasks and instructions, sometimes becoming completely different. So depending on where you sat, and which combination of performers you met, and in what order, you could get a very different show from someone sat 4 places away. The intention was to use the table not as a barrier, but as an intimate place to meet someone, talk, hear stories, make something.

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