Morning Forum with Peader Kirk: Saturday, 10 April

Beginnings and obstacles

What is your genealogy, who is in your family tree? What inspired you to start with this work? What would you have been if you had chosen a different path? Where would you be? Paeder Kirk led the opening session of Day 2, which turned into a living installation that addressed many of the key questions that emerge for beginning directors, and which for the experienced practitioners served as a point of retrospection. From aspiring nurses through academics to a nuclear biologist, the papers with our alternate selves were placed on the chairs in the audience. From here, they were looking out at who we had chosen to become in the hour that followed.
The directors responded to the various questions through writing, confessionals, and google images, which resulted in a live installation for us all to explore. Whether it was about passing on advice or sharing a personal blunder, everyone participated and became part of what was going on. The result was a beautiful mixture of experiences, where beginning steps were retraced and the end result seen in a new light. Most stations were anonymous and nameless, but the confessional to the camera was the only place where people “had to own up to what they said”, as Peader put it. Those daring to try found their early experience taken to a new level, adding layers of meaning that never occurred to them before.

Do we look back at where we came from often enough? Do we even need to do it? Tracing and connecting, many directors discovered they had ideas and legacies in common with other directors where they had not expected them to be. And maybe we should be looking at the unusual, rather than the usual connections of what and where and how the different influences and practitioners are connected? Questions have certainly been posed, but the answers remain unknown. As directors, we all know that unlikely events and unexpected connections is precisely what governs both the work and the end result. Let us hope the days to come will provide us with new insight and inspirations. Today was a promising step on the way.

- Ragnhild Dale