(nominated by Anna Dumitriu)
Performance at Shunt Lounge, London, 2009
protoPLAY's group performance as part of Shunt Vault's exploration of the spaces beneath London Bridge Station.
All Fours, 4th - 7th March 2009, Shunt, London
protoPLAY brought together a group of performance and sound artists, from London, Bristol, Cardiff, Brighton, Estonia and California, to create '2 (two)', a new collaborative performance work looking at the philosophy of the self.
The work is inspired both by ancient and modern philosophy and makes allusions to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, Cartesian duality (the mind/body split) and Clark and Chalmers’ notion of 'The Extended Mind' (the idea that part of our ‘mind’ might be contained outside of our heads, in a notebook for instance). Key to the work is the proposition that we all see the world from our own particular but unique perspectives; and that we constantly define boundaries in order to identify and classify things (including ourselves) and be able to know them.
These ideas were played out on a specially constructed raised stage. The audience members were only able to watch the performance by poking their heads through holes that had been cut in the floor of the stage. The live performance was hidden from outside observers by a curtain, which only revealed the audience's headless bodies. A video screen of the live action was visible to those outside. The structure of the stage seemed designed to make explicit the mind/body split and throw into question the standard relationship of the boundary between audience and spectacle, whilst intertwining references to Plato.
The actual performance was designed to make explicit these inter-subjective divisions and had a strong surreal quality. The semi-naked performers wore black boxes on their heads as they oiled their bodies and read out texts, each in their own little world. Sometimes the performers would interact with the disembodied audience’s heads, building toy houses for them or wrapping their heads in cling film; sometimes the audience could only look on.
The work was a dramatic and memorable experience, whose improvised and collaborative character succeeded in drawing the audience in. When it ended, people were slow to leave. The complex background to the work was partly made explicit by the reading of texts but relied more strongly on metaphor rather than trying to be didactic. In many ways it raised more questions than answers and I think that properly reflects our level of understanding of the nature of cognition.
protoplay.net
