Circle Drawing

Last week we were shooting a new video piece, A Perfect Circle. The work has been commissioned by Sheffield Contemporary Art Forum for the Sheffield Pavilion 2009.

A Perfect Circle draws on material from the shamanic-ritual inspired performance piece 9 Billion Miles From Home and its development process.

Here's some of what we said about it in the proposal to Sheffield Pavillion (which in part borrows from this):

Over the years we have seen a constant interaction and influence between the work in different media on each other – performers on stage interacting with projected images, reframing them for the audience; a performer on video engaging the audience as if they were in the room with them live; installation work that incorporates durational performance, video, photography and made objects into one environment.

One strand of this has been a series of video works born out of, inspired by, and kicking against the video documentation of live performances that they originate from. Works created, authored, in the edit suite. Work that pays little heed to the formal construction of the originating performance work, but which focuses on a single moment, or idea, or feeling from that live work and responds to and/or amplifies it. As we fix a performance project in a video document of it, we find ourselves continuing the devising process and taking the work off at a tangent.

More recently these works have started to use video shot as part of the devising process, rather than documentation of a public performance, taking that tangent away from the originating process at an earlier stage. For example, Assembly (2008) utilises video footage shot as a try-out for what would eventually become live link video in the performance Parts For Machines That Do Things, and manipulates and layers it into something quite different.

A Perfect Circle takes this a step further. We shoot the circle making element of the performance piece 9 Billion Miles From Home (2007) specifically for the video work, and go back to material (a description of the world as described by the 116 images on the Voyager satellites) from the process that we liked, but that didn’t fit into the final performance. Combining these starting points we will experiment in post production to create something new – a satellite project from the original performance.

Chris has got the footage in the edit suite, but has to finish off two other pieces, Technology and Benchers, for the screening at the Showroom this Friday first...

Intangible Heritage

A nice week in Glasgow last week at the Sibmas Conference, discussing the problems associated with documenting and archiving intangible cultural heritage, specifically live performance.

I've written previously that there is more to say about our work with Christopher Hall, our Associate Artist (Film and Video).  Well, in Glasgow last week I said quite a lot about that, in a paper about how our Digital Shorts (Hang Up 02:39:02 pictured above and below) are a response to having to document live work 'faithfully', and how they have in turn influenced our other film and video work .  Here's an extract:

4. Some Problems With Documentation

From the outset, an ongoing company debate about the documentation of live performance.  We need to produce full length videos of our performances for promoters, archives and educational establishments.  We also need 5 – 10 minute samplers to show when giving lectures about our work.   We require them, practically, but these video documents don’t satisfy us creatively.  They're constrained by having to represent the performance, but are some distance from the experience of seeing the work live. 

Senseless 02:47:18 opened a door for us.  We realised that we could carry on exploring the ideas and themes of a live project, even as we are fixing it in the process of documenting it.

The process of making these shorts has much in common with our process of making our live work.  The core of Third Angel is the two Artistic Directors - Rachael Walton and myself.  For each project we draw together a group of collaborators – performers, sound recordists, composers - some familiar and regular; some new. Christopher Hall, now Associate Artist, has been working with us since we set up in 1995.

In devising the work we map out a territory, an area of interest, set an agenda.  We ask our collaborators to explore that territory with us, respond to what we've got, bring in new ideas.  We generate far more material, more ideas, than we can use in the final piece.  Many of these ideas will not be used because they don’t work, aren’t interesting enough, aren’t good enough.  But some of them just don’t fit, through time or formal constraints; some are the beginnings of something else.

So even when a project is ready to start meeting an audience, there are still loose ends to be used, or new ideas nagging at us.  Even as we tie a live performance to video in making the documentation we need, we are able to continue devising, trying out ideas in relation to the themes we are exploring, through making a digital short inspired by it.

We go in to the edit suite with rushes, much in the way we go into rehearsal with a bit of text or an idea for a section of the show.  Rachael and I have already set a territory by making the live work; Chris begins his exploration within that territory, sometimes responding to seeing the work live, sometimes responding to making the documentation of it.  He sets out to find something that interests him within the territory we have laid out.  

My paper was followed by a really interesting presentation by my old pal Becky Edmunds, who used to be a dancer and choreographer (her past tense), and is now a dance film maker.  She showed us a video duet made with Fiona Wright, in which only Fiona appears, but of which both artists are clearly authors.

In spirit Becky's work is quite close to our Digital Shorts, I feel.  She said a nice thing, something like: "I won't make something accurate, but I will make something appropriate".  She talked about the gap between the live performance and the documentation of it, and suggested three solutions: Ignore it (just video it from the back of the audience), try to lessen it (use more cameras to give you close ups and opportunity to edit) or (her approach) jump in to it and have fun, play around in it, make it wider.

Later in our session, Daisy Abbott (Glasgow University) gave a paper that pulled together some of these strands nicely.  She observed that a worry with a 'faithful' video document of a performance is that it becomes the authoritative version, even though it is just one example of that performance.  That even the final performance of a particular piece isn't a summation of performances that have gone before, it is just one more version.  So for a video of one particular performance (or for-camera version) to acquire that status can be problematic to many artists (I know it is for us, particularly if work is documented early in a tour).

Daisy quoted Peggy Phelan's observations that "the performance becomes itself through disappearance" and that documentation is not an act of representation but of transformation (any inaccuracies mine, not Daisy's).