Whitechapel Gallery 24 October 2023
What interests me the most about live performance is that it is a shared live experience, it’s about being present.
Terry Smith with Paola Piccato, Sarah April Lamb, Randolph Matthews and Lise Boucon.
Tuesday 24 October
Mirror is a live artwork preoccupied by isolation, repetition, and routine – human conditions which concern, absorb, and connect us.
The central music is the piece Two6 by John Cage with other audio works completing the soundtrack. The movement draws on influences that include Pina Bausch, Merce Cunningham, Station House Opera, Theatre of Mistakes, Gary Stevens, Kenneth McMillian, Trisha Brown, and Yvonne Rainer.
The performers are Lise Boucon, Sarah April Lamb, Randolph Matthews. Paola Piccato is associate choreographer.
Rehearsals at the Whitechapel Gallery
It begins..
I start work in different ways. This piece is a development from a performance that was realised and presented to a live audience in Folkestone in September 2021. The starting point for this work is that performance. So I am rethinking and playing with those elements in the construction of this work. What started out to be a tweaking exercise as turned into something more, a new work.
I have asked the Italian choreographer Paola Piccato to be associate choreographer to help and support this project. I have worked with Paola before on Combine, the first work I made with dancers in 2012.
The performers in this piece are crucial and their experiences and abilities are intrinsic. This work is in a sense a series of solo parts, but each one connects with the others in some way.
All of the performers have their own practice, performance artists, dancers, actress and composer musician and that is also something that they bring to the work.
Mapping measurement and shape are the first things I begin with. So I have measured the performance area by pacing it and also with a detailed plan.
For the purposes of my method and process I have divided the space into metre squares / There are 54 x1 metre squares.
The Plan
What looks like a plan, might be a plan
A picture of me that explains why i don’t perform, i am pretending that I am unaware that there is a camera in my face, and it shows.
I dont know how the creative process works, but I trust it anyway
Most of the time my main plan is not to fall over or hurt myself climbing up a ladder or something like that. I make loads of notes and drawings, making shapes for the performers to follow. I have noticed that these drawing and notes draw very little attention from the performers. Perhaps its only for me. Thinking aloud.
This piece began as a simple remaking of the earlier work Mirror Mirror, I resisted making a new work, but I can resist no more. So this new work retains only the music by John Cage, every other element is changed. Once this means that a new title for the work will emerge, perhaps.
My process and method is exactly the same for whatever medium I happen to find myself in. I go over the material, watch things, read things, draw things and write things.
Eventually something emerges that seems to be watchable or readable or whatever.
I find that I have a habit of jumping into things without any notion about how to do it. And I think that its a strength.
The more I researched dance, and watched performance the more I realise how little I know. And curiously the more my knowledge me increase slightly but the amount of what I don’t know expands. Its like the horizon, the closer you get the further away it seems.
Because i was not trained in dance or direction or composition, is I think an advantage, not knowing, means that I have to invent a way of doing it.
Part of this process is the workshops, where we try out ideas, discuss and everyone contributes it is this process that I am most interested in, because its the only way I have to focus the work. Because even though I have set up the conditions and the framework, its only through this process that I find the work.
There are many different starting points and they gradually become edited and reimagined. The final work has bits of all these things. Sometimes really interesting actions, movements happen but I might to decide that they dont fit and so we can use them in another piece. So often the workshop situation produces a number of possibly future works.
Its hard to say what the work is about, because the process is about asking questions rather than looking for answers. So we are exploring things like isolation, loneliness, OCD and fear, the work is not an essay, or an illustration of those things, its a kind of working through them. It might work and it might not.
The key to this method is that its a collaboration, first Paola who is associate choreographer and the performers whose contributions are essential in the shape of the performances. Its a kind of overused adage, but the process and method is a journey that we are all taking.
7 September Folkestone Studio
Rehearsal 1
One of the challenges is to schedule in time for all the workshops and rehearsals. At the moment there will only be one occasion when we can all rehearse at the same time. Thats the day of the performance.
Its very difficult for one performer to work alone in an ensemble piece, even though in this instance none of the performers directly work with another, not even making eye contact. So I thought it would be easy to rehearse one at a time. I was wrong. There needs to be a certain dynamic which even if you dont relate directly you need to have ‘bodies’ about you doing something. So in this situation, Paola and I would take part, sometimes together to help create something of an ensemble work. This was a major development for me, because taking part in the rehearsals gives me an insight into the weight and movement. Most of my work is watching but being able to feel the movements is something that I will continue.
11 September Folkestone Studio
Rehearsal 2
This time working with Lise and Randolph. The studio has been cleared out to accommodate the rehearsals and is roughly a third of the performing area that we have at the Whitechapel Gallery. However it became clear that as this was almost and entirely new piece and in a sense specific for the Whitechapel space, we decided to relocate further rehearsals to the Whitechapel space on Mondays when the gallery is closed.
18 September Whitechapel Gallery
Rehearsal 3
First rehearsal and workshop at the Whitechapel Gallery The process is a collaboration between everyone involved. I am delighted to be working alongside Paola Piccato, associate choreographer and continue where we left of with Combine in 2012.
In this first site rehearsal i stood in to give Lise a body to respond to. Although it is largely a set of solo works, each performer develops their own specific idiosyncratic repetitions their is a number of interactions and encounters that although not specifically rehearsed do need to be
25 September Whitechapel Gallery
Rehearsal 4
Working in the space is a huge advantage. The piece is not about the space but the room itself is directly influencing the composition of the work.
The condition of the space and where the audience view, which is from three sides is another element in the work.
9 October Theatre Deli
rehearsal 5
16 October Whitechapel Studio
rehearsal 6
23 October Whitechapel Gallery 2
Rehearsals 7
24 October Whitechapel Gallery 2
Performance
Section 1 of 4
THANKS
Rubiane Maia, Ash McNaughton, Manuel Vason, John Woolrich, Paul Cheneour, Cheryl Pierce, Chelsey Browne, Mark Prentice-Whitney
Creative Folkestone, Editions Peters and Brillant Classics and Laura Khan of the John Cage Trust
The Whitechapel Gallery
THE ENSEMBLE
Working as an ensemble and a group is by far the most constructive method to making a new work. The workshops and rehearsals are a two way street of ideas and possibilities. I have been and continue to be very luck to work with people of great individual talents and enormous generosity.
Paola Piccato (Choreographer)
photographer
Paola began her dance studies in contemporary and ballet at the Accademia Regionale di Danza del Teatro Nuovo, before undertaking a diploma in Set Design at the Accademia di Belle Arti, Turin, Italy. Paola then went on to study a post graduate certificate in Dance in community from Trinity Laban, London.
Paola worked as a choreographer for the Wilton Music Hall, in London for the “Scene in Time” family events, from 2014 to 2017 working with the local schools. She has also delivered dance workshops in adults’ community setting and for school children in London and in Italy.
In late 2022, Paola joined the Language of Dance Centre as Outreach Project Developer.
Sarah April Lamb (Performer)
Sarah April Lamb is a movement artist, theatre maker and movement teacher currently working across theatre, performance art and performance installation. Her work is rooted in radical tenderness. Movement Direction credits include work for Dante or Die, Sweet Beef, Doppelgangster, Scripped Up, LAMDA and LCM. Original creations include promenade performance Find me, Fool (Fieldworks, 2022); immersive installation Almost Apart (Bloomsbury Theatre, 2021); Things I Know About You (Roundhouse, 2019), and To Breathe (Summerhall, 2015). She is currently a movement tutor at ArtsEd on their BA, MA and Foundation Acting programmes.
Randolph Matthews (Performer)
Photo Chelsey Browne
Randolph Matthews, the acclaimed British jazz vocalist, has garnered high praise from respected music critics and industry experts. Songlines lauded him as a "stunning, McFerrin-esque talent," while The Guardian described his sound as "cinematic vocal jazz." Jazz FM praised Randolph's "dazzling improvisational skills" and deemed him "flawless and world-class."
With a career spanning 25 years, Randolph has collaborated with an impressive roster of artists, including jazz luminaries Herbie Hancock, Richard Bona, Bill Frisell, and Will I am as well as Mulatu Astatke, Sean Kuti, Ashley Henry, Angelique Kidjo, Terry Callier, and others from across Europe, Central Africa, and America.
As Randolph celebrates his 50th birthday in 2023, he is set to release and tour his new album, Transcendence, featuring the atmospheric support of a band consisting of Alcyona Mick on piano and Andy Hamill on bass. He has established himself as one of the UK's leading contemporary vocalists and performers, with his compositions reflecting a range of musical styles, from classical to African/Caribbean rhythms, to jazz and choral.
Randolph also runs voice movements retreats for performers ,vocalists and thoughts interested in self development check out
Lise Boucon (Performer)
While her work encompasses both movement and words, her body is her main tool. She uses it as a political object to question identity: who am I? She also uses it as a place to experiment with what freedom from preconceived definitions and norms imposed by culture, gender and education look and feels like.
From personal stories to common narratives, there is no limit (formal or moral) in her research and practice, solo or in collaboration. She is going as far as her intuition leads her, or as the project needs to, pushing then her own boundaries, and exploring her non-comfort zone. This includes nudity, intimacy and duration, and the use of animals as well as natural materials.
She usually performs in non-dedicated and site-specific spaces, in a close (and often participative) relationship with the audience. She tries so to cross the line in social interactions, hoping this makes all – performer and audience – more active and engaged.
Unusual, odd, provocative and/or radical, baroque and surrealist, ritualistic, and definitely peculiar, so is her work.