Impossible to work

The second session of the Lucky Pierre Workshop was dedicated to developing the work we produced in the first week. Karen started us off with some yoga. A vocalisation exercise followed as well as being handed copies of everyone’s writing exercise from the first session. Then came the real fun: everyone’s show and tell.

I can’t remember all of the items from 1988, but I do recall a copy of a Terence Trent d’Arby casette, a roget’s thesaurus, a casio mini-keyboard, and a zine made by a participant in 1988. I brought in a snippet of text from George Bush’s acceptance speech at the GOP’s national convention (you know which one). These were really interesting and fun. Most people brought in things relating to popular culture, mine was the only overtly political reference. Everybody’s items were great (most amusing was the thesaurus, brought in because the participant didn’t recall 1988 so well. It proved to be a great object in the end, one of the most amusing).

We then regrouped to expand our 1-minute group performances from last week into 5-minute performances that now had to include singing and elements from our presentations. We were instructed, at the end of our prep time, to write 3 instructions for a volunteer performer (our instructions 1)remove your shoes, 2)uh I don’t remember 2, 3)realize your feet as hands).”^a1a”

Before starting our new performances we were told to pay attention to one assigned performance very closely. After everybody did their thing (which this time was a bit more arty across the board) we sat back down in our groups to figure out the beginning, middle and end of our group’s performance. Once this was figured out, we were told to take lunch and prepare a new performance that worked like this:

Copy the group performance that we watched so intently
Insert the middle of our piece into the middle of the copied performance and apply a rule given by Karen (these included “slow motion and without using your hands” and in our group’s case “radical speed change”).

Our first performance of the day involved a lot of sign language. Well, finger spelling. Much of our original performance was still there, except that we started by removing our shoes and then continued to attempt communication without speaking. I was trying to get across “read my lips” nonverbally while the other two performers used their bodies to react. This (somehow) lead to singing or droning of elvis lyrics (which related to the zine previously mentioned. 88 was the 10th anniversary of the king’s death, I believe). This performance was much better I think than the previous week’s performance in spite of its utter lack of sense. There was a lot of physical improvisation going on and I was happier with it in a way.

When we went about copying the other group’s performance we ran into a wall: it involved singing a song about a vaguely samoan man maping his recollection. Oi. A brave member volunteered to do it, while I put on another member’s hoodie and sandles. There was running back and forth involved and a lot of nonense and making things up.
It was great though, if for no other reason than the fact that we had developed a nonsensical piece of performance out of related things. We were generating a vocabulary of movements, texts and even a bit of (non)music out of non sequitirs we had (literally) been handed just a week before. Over the course of two days a week apart from each other, we had what could be turned into the seeds of a whole piece. Complete strangers had become collaborators and we had all learned a bit about a way to kickstart the creative process. I think that’s pretty nifty.

1. ”I particularly enjoy this sort of instruction. When things don’t make sense you have to make sense of them illogically, and you end up doing interesting things. How else can you define a posture as the shape of “marbelling in conjunction with abnegation?” aaa