3,4
Performance, video
Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/73220956
3,4 explores miscommunication and our overabundant interpersonal demands and social strictures that affect desire and performance. It is also a reflection on the evasiveness and difficulty of describing and capturing an experience, a feeling. Interested in sound, rhythm, counting, control, the first part of 3,4 was performed live, while the second half constituted a sort of a tableau vivant, where the performers held their positions and a pre-recorded German version of the piece played over speakers. The backdrop of heavy curtains suggested conventional theatrical limits, but also the home-as-public, the effect being one of both intimacy and restriction (a theme also explored in the script). This spoke to themes of habitual self-disciplining, the attractiveness of trespass, and the vulnerability that lies in explicitness. I called 3,4 an ‘exercise in rhythm’ for its links to musical recitation. A performance score can be activated in ‘playing’, but can also remain resolutely textual and readable, lodged in a conceptual frame that only theoretically instructs you to feel or do something.
Performance:
Torn Page, New York, May 2013
With: Emma Stirling, Lanny Jordan Jackson