Politics of Practice by Lynette Hunter

Author:Lynette Hunter
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030140199
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

6.5.4 Record of Engagement with Articulations

6.5.4.1 Watching the Performance Becoming a Rehearsal

I’m attending the performance with a friend, and we arrive an hour early at 7 pm. The chairs are pretty much in the arrangement they had been yesterday but feel more fixed because there are risers to allow for double rows of seats. The performers are warming up with three exercises—‘humping the room’, shaking the body and a long sequence of raising and lowering the arms—that energise and erotically charge the space. Around 7.30 pm, Hennessy comes over to us and shows us ‘the list’, which is scribbled on a piece of torn cardboard and holds a number of the elements I’d noted down the previous day. The performers start drifting on and off and around the playing area as audience members come in. Some of these are asked if they would like to sit in the pod at the back left of the stage, and are escorted to this small 16-person seating area. There’s a positioning of the books on the cardboard, with one or two performers picking them up and reading them. Someone places a bright pink blanket on the space in front of the lighting and sound control panel, carefully positioning onto it two small bells, a banana, a phone, a book on DEBT and a Festival t-shirt.

Hennessy’s concept of ‘soft borders’ for the production melds the performers with the audience members, and around 8pm, several of these mixed groups start up fake healing experiences. Around the edges of the stage, into and out of the black backdrop curtain and the spaces along the walls of the production area, Hennessy dances through the boundaries of the playing place. Some of the performers cluster around the trapeze. A performer who had not been present at either of the two rehearsal sessions I’d attended pees into a cup—let’s call him pee-performer—while another performer begins to offer bourbon around audience members. Both actions are suddenly dislocated by the similar colour of pee and bourbon. The pee-performer pours some pee into two other cups and places them on the ground at the centre of the stage area. He is joined by an audience member and these two self-consciously and with great concentration move the three cups around as if they are playing chess.

Just as most of the audience are getting into the healing rituals, possibly trying to work out their significance, one performer calls for a ‘one-minute silence’ and invites the audience onto the stage. As the lights dim, about a third to a half of the audience move onto the stage, inhabiting the playing area continually, entering and leaving throughout the entire performance.

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