Sunday, July 19, 2015

Low Concept: "A Solo Performance for Five People?" : David Miller

Wed Mar 07, 2012

When Jane Wang asked me to make a performance for the Art of the UnGrand series, we may both have had the default assumption that it would be a solo performance. Certainly that was my assumption at first - probably because solos have long been the default format in the performance art world. I've done a number of these myself. I think this has to do with performance art's relationship with the visual arts, where individual work is the norm. (I am sure someone will correct my facile understanding.)

But although solo performance is something I have done in the past and may very well do again, for a few years now I basically have gone blank when thinking about it. Virtually nothing comes up - no images, no concepts, no sense of commitment, no inspiration. Despite my almost incessant use of the first-person-singular in my writing, I'm not actually that interested in myself. I am interested in myself as I collaborate and learn from others. This is enlivening to me, and I can give a great deal to working closely with even one other person.

There was a threshold moment I experienced about a decade ago. I was at a dance concert at Green Street Studios in Cambridge. I don't remember which company it was. I was suddenly washed over by this feeling of great ache and emptiness, as I watched the dancers working together, committed together, in this situation of complex mutual interdependence. That seemed like living to me. Working alone suddenly seemed like starving or suffocating.

So in starting to develop this piece, Low Concept, I quickly came to grips with the fact that it would not be a solo. At minimum, if anything at all was going to happen by the end of March, I would at least need someone to talk with.

As it has turned out, there will be five of us. We will be working in a coordinated, somewhat interdependent but also independent fashion - each of us doing what we do, simultaneously and with mutual understanding. We will not have a shared "script" or "score," however - more like a commonly understood scenario. The conversations I've had with Jed and Cathy have informed what all three of us are developing. I have asked Joanne and Alisia to develop completely independent actions, integrated with the rest of the performance only by their occurrence in time. I don't know what they are going to do, at all. But even knowing that what I do may be interrupted by what they will do helps me develop my own work.

Of course, in this posting I haven't said a single concrete thing about imagery, themes and so on. Another post or two for that. This one is about working method, and why this might be a solo performance for five people.

March 7, 2011