Abstract
Commisioned by Dr. Jonas Stampe (Séte/Göteborg). Stampe’s original idea behind the Festival was the conviction that it was necessary to create a platform for performance art in France, and further to this to emphasise the importance of public access to what in many instances are highly experimental contemporary practices. As a consequence all of the festival performances were non-gallery based and took place in public spaces in the city itself. No other such international festival exists for this area of visual practice in France. The performance used sheets of stage direction from a conventional play script as the momentum for the work: (‘The Marriage,’ by Witold Gombrowicz: first performed at the Theatre Recamier, Paris, 1964 a play that exposes the societal effects of institutional political corruption, particularly of civil institutions.) This stage direction, in the form of large printed sheets was augmented by a number of very short plays/events that Henderson had written. The performance consisted of improvising with the stage direction, the short additional plays, and the audience in performance. The performance art work, a further development of the material, continued research into the possible relationships and tensions between the written word, its interpretation and its performed sequential reality, notably in this case in a non-gallery setting: the work took place out on the streets in Séte, intentionally using the genre of street theatre as a context for its presentation. A further reading of this material occurred (in the tradition of a staged reading of a play in a theatre) with Professor David Hopkins at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh on the 5th July 2006, as an event associated with Dada’s Boys, an exhibition that Hopkins curated. There were 45 artists involved in this International Festival including Bill Drummond, Boris Nieslony and Professor Artur Tajber.
Original language | English |
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Publication status | Published - 2006 |
Event | Infr'Action Festival International d’art Performance 2006 - Séte, France Duration: 20 Sept 2006 → 24 Sept 2006 http://www.infraction.info/en/archives/infraction-2.html |
Keywords
- Performance art