With past projects ranging from spectacular site-specific works created with 10,000 concrete blocks, to simultaneous performances across continents using live internet streaming, Station House Opera is an internationally renowned performance company with a unique physical and visual style.
Life should go in certain patterns, but it rarely does. The opposite of the expected often makes psychological sense if you run it backwards. By definition backwardsness confounds our expectations, while illuminating the illusions that sustain social and emotional form. The architecture of behaviour is revealed. This laboratory will oscillate between practice and analysis; participants will work alongside Julian Maynard Smith in exploring themes such as backwards action, backwards thinking, backwards emotion, backwards politics whilst developing strategies for more extended performance ideas.
Julian has worked as a sculptor and film-maker but primarily as a performance artist, first making solo pieces and then, from 1980 onwards, larger scale work with the group Station House Opera.
We talked about backwardness. About Slaughterhouse-Five and the bombing of Dresden. We talked about avoiding the consequences of our actions. About progress. About moving forwards even in rare moments of stillness. We talked about Straw Dogs and humanism. We talked about freedom and control and the kindness found in backwards mugging. We talked about where to begin. We wanted to ask forgiveness for things we hadn't yet done.
ReplyDeleteAnd so we regressed towards the future. A series of actions, exercises, first undertaken alone and then together. We realised in order to go backwards we first had to decide on how to go forwards. We tried to invent our pasts. There were discussions about how backwards a backwards action was, how impossible backwards actions were or were not possible and how some actions were in fact the same forwards and backwards/backwards and forwards.
At the end of our day, or was it in fact the beginning, we left with tired brains and thoughts of whether we should be going for dinner or actually whether breakfast would be more appropriate.
Just leave a note of my appreciation for your welcome nurture and collaboration
ReplyDeletelove
Giu
Feeling as if I have completed an intensive session of brain training exercises, I begin to reflect back on the three-day workshop.
ReplyDeleteMy head still a little slow, I find it hard to put into words exactly 'what we did', there was no formal structure as such to the days spent with Julian. We simply seemed to exist together, as a group, exploring ideas as they came and sorting through problems as they arose.
Always focusing on the notion of backwardness, we found ways to move together, created scenarios and actions, sharing our discoveries and discussing in detail our finding.
It was indeed a laboratory.
We had backwards conversations starting with the answer and then asking the question. We made the same backwards journey over and over around the building, trying to find the natural movement, trying to train the brain, body and eye. We played backwards outside, running uphill, downhill, around corners, staging a backwards murder and a backwards mugging to show the possible humanity in reverse, to give life back. We improvise backwards movements, gestures, physical propositions and then what could have existed beforehand, sculpting our pasts with our bodies.
At the end, we decided it was hard, rough, tiring. We were finding it hard to talk about, but we decided there was something there, something in it, there was something that worked. In the backwardness we found a way to continue.