Rea Dennis

When I started my Time and Space Inbetween blog some years ago I was preoccupied with the concepts of time and space, in many ways intangible yet in every way, so large in my life. Having migrated to Wales from Australia, I was living multiple moments of adjustment in my temporal (zones, day lengths, seasons) and spatial life. Not least of these a new experience with memory and longing (missing, be-longing).

The space of memory and the collapsing of the temporal in the act of remembering took my attention as I explored autobiographical performance making in the TT & RT projects with Magda. The space in between the two of us, engaging with memory and working up performative responses to memories of place – a place, a specific place – me, a beach, her, a rooftop – was fraught with all kinds of tensions. Despite the quality of the resultant piece, these tensions drove me to write a number of conference papers as I struggled with making sense of the creative process. The conference papers provided ‘spaces’ for negotiating meaning, for discussing things with myself, my inner and outer self, my cogent and embodied selves. It was through notions of embodiment (ASDA 2010) ‘collaboration’ (TaPRA 2011) and of ‘dramaturgy’ (ASDA 2012) that I held these spaces. Responses from peers/audiences were varied, much more varied than those of the audiences of the performance itself. Within the performance frame audience members did not expect to engage with ‘my thinking’ – my intellect. Rather there was space for them to bring/build their own meaning. In fact, Ranciere’s notion of emancipated spectator appeared on the horizon of one of these conference papers and provides a very useful companion to my process.

Ranciere suggests that the innate reciprocity between audience and performer is beyond understanding, pointing to the naturally occurring phenomenon of human interaction where interpretation rather than understanding occurs. Audience members are “active interpreters who try to invest their own translations in order to appropriate the story for themselves and make their own story out of it” (1).

Life is full of simultaneity, so of course at this time I was also engaging with ideas of the ‘kinesthetic’ and acts of ‘cognition’ – in fact, I arrived ‘kinesthetic’ and ‘cognition’ through trying to write about embodiment and experiencing a relieving sense of distance when watching Eduardo Coutinho’s fascinating film Jogo de Cena. Indeed, this experience alongside the other strands of my research while in Brazil – opened a space to dig down more determinedly into what had become a challenging area of research.

Following three (failed) AHRC bids to fund research for exploring the micro-processes of “acting” in playback theatre through practice and performance – I journeyed sideways with my thinking through the work of the two Brazilian actresses featured in Coutinho’s film (Fernanda Torres and Andrea Beltrão). The film reveals (one might say exposes) these exceptionally successful actress – across all stages and medias in Brazil for over 20 years each – in what might be considered moments of doubt, of imperfection, or emotional or cognitive conflicts as they seek to portray a character who is in fact a real person, speaking words that are the uttered words of that other real person. Something that might occur in playback theatre. These case studies, and the documentary film context opened a new space to tease out and indeed articulate some of what I was struggling to say.

So, whilst on the one hand, I was engaging with the making in TT & RT project, I was also occupying this other space of teasing out possible philosophical understandings of the actor. I was able to do this in front of distinctly different audiences from Derek Paget’s ‘Acting the Real’ conference in Reading in September 2010, to Nicola Shaughnessy’s Affective Science and Performance Symposium at the Centre for Cognition, Kinesthetics and Performance in September 2012. The Kent experience opened yet another space, with a comment from Rhonda Blair leading me to the Alba method…

Space and time is once again pressing in on me. Ways in which to organise myself, to capture moments of creative thinking. In this blog I open a space for active philosophising; a space to catch whimsical moments of meaning, to ask questions, to probe, to follow leads or to simply rest. A space that might structure playfulness; contest self-consorship; exist in spite of rational thinking;  where i might risk being naugthy, risk being exposed or revealed in the way that Torres and Beltrão were; a space for the exhilarating risk of the fragility and vulnerability in living my authentic life.

Artists frequently live within the tensions of and between caution and risk where finding spaces in which to risk becomes central to creative practice.

Performer, artist and film maker Tim Etchells (2) once wrote:

“not long ago, members of the irish performance company desperate optimists spoke of a no-man’s land at the edge of the streets where they grew up – a blackberry field where local kids would hang out and make mischief. It was to this place, as Jo and Christine Lawlor put it, that kids would go to find the unexpected, the dangerous and the almost inexplicable – a fire, a stripping or a stone-throwing fight. Jo said that in the blackberry field a kid called Dessie Ryan once pulled down someone’s pants and whipped him soundly with stinging nettles. Hearing Jo describe it, you could not help but think that was one of those gigs where you really should have been.

I would guess that any childhood has a place just like that blackberry field: a dump, a snow house, a patch of waste ground, an empty factory, a place for breaking bottles, or impromptu helter-skelter; a place for the heating up of old fireworks to the point of explosion. Of course, when Jo and Christine talked about the blackberry field that night in Nottingham, they invoked its space – at once physical, social, cultural, psychic and imaginative – as a kind of junior equivalent to that of contemporary performance.

We go to performance, as artist, makers, audience, producers and critics when we want the unexpected, the dark, the comic, the inexplicable. It is to performance we go when we want the borders between our daily lives and our imaginative lives to bend and blur and little, when we want to play out and challenge the orthodoxy, the rules and separations through which and in which we live.”

(1) Jacques Ranciere, The emancipated spectator (London: Verso, 2009), 11.

(2) Tim Etchells, Valuable Spaces: New performance in the 1990s.
In Nicky Childs and Jeni Walwin (eds). A Split Second of Paradise: Live Art, Installation and Performance. (Rivers Oram Press: London, 1998), 3.