Exploiting Physical and Bodily Interruption

Performing Fall and Rise and Yes/No taught me how I could extend my repertoire of tactics to provoke audience participation in performance by including physical and bodily interruptive processes. As a result, in planning Lost for Words, an audience participative Performance Art that took place at South Hill Park, Bracknell in 2011, I sought to exploit and make much more of interruptive processes that I had previously been engaged in by making direct reference to slapstick.

The main aspect that I wanted to draw upon from Fall and Rise and accentuate in

Lost for Words related to how participants in Fall and Rise use their bodies as

part of a collective action. Making usage of the process of confusing what is spoken and what is enacted through the body that I performed as part of Yes/No,

I wanted to engage a group of participants in a similar process. This was for them to gain direct experience as to what happens when we engage our bodies in an activity that really accentuates its physicality as to interrupt process. Furthermore, in relation to my focused aspects of slapstick, this decision would also enable me to witness first-hand the social implications at play of performing slapstick as a collective. Based on my own experience in Yes/No of performing slapstick by myself in front of an audience (and the potential embarrassment and shame that can take place in getting slapstick wrong), in Lost for Words I wanted to make participative exchange and the subsequent power relations at play within that participation much more complicated by confusing the distinction between audience and performer. To explain, in Lost for Words the action that audience members would undertake would be a simulation of the actions that I undertook as a performer in Yes/No. Rather than an audience watching me undertake a series of actions i.e., ‘do slapstick’ by generating a series of actions confusing sound and verbal elements resulting in a (laughter-inducing incongruity) as in

Yes/No, on this occasion they would simultaneously witness and produce

slapstick. I wanted to find out how other participants would react when another participant fails to perform an act of deliberate clumsiness correctly.

Referring to the difficulties in engaging all participants to carry out a very specific form of activity whilst enacting the same activity myself, documentation of Fall

and Rise reveals that not all the performers enacted my instruction to run into the

sea naked. Some of the performers kept their underpants on/wore swimming costumes (note the performers in the far left hand side of Figure 13). A mismatch had occurred in terms of my experience of events taking place at the time of the performance and what actually occurred. I had understood at the time that everybody who ran into the sea was naked but the documentation proves otherwise. Rather than seeing this as a failure within the work, I viewed this mismatch between my perception of events and what happened in actuality as revealing information about the boundaries/limits that performers set themselves. The performance had been set up for participants to be exhibitionists but revealed that some persons taking part were quite conservative. In Lost for

contained incongruous ‘interruptive’ elements, but to also consider how potential mismatch may occur in terms of motives and purposes amongst all parties involved.

To ensure that everybody in the audience participates in slapstick, I rethought my role as the performance protagonist in terms of how I direct them to enact instructions that would lead them to produce slapstick. This meant employing a sidekick to help me ensure everyone in the audience enacts the instructions given out. The actual nature of the instructions that I would give participants during Lost

for Words would demand that they enact slapstick interruptions repeatedly to

increase them being clumsy and make other participants laugh at them (a direct expression of the emotion Schadenfreude). To make the clumsiness even more deliberate than in Yes/No, participants would have to contend with not having the sound element of the work pre-recorded; they would have to produce the sound themselves through speech. I anticipated that this shift in the work would add a further complication to make much more use of the effects of liveness in terms of the possibility of actions going wrong when performed live. I anticipated that what participants would get back in return for their act of commitment/consent to participate would relate to a range of reasons. First, participants would be part of something collective, secondly they would step outside the routines and habits of their daily lives and thirdly, participants would be given my permission to behave in a way that could be seen as subversive/dissensual in terms of social norms of behaviour relating to the body and language and also in terms of behavioural norms related to the context of location.17 _{There was also the ‘cool’/credibility}

factor to consider; participants may think that, for them, it is fashionable and trendy to participate in Performance Art.

The slapstick protagonist is continually prone to attack through either a bodily revolt or loss of self- control, or from an external source that aims to dismantle his dignity [....] the body is utterly malleable and infinitely resourceful. At the heart of slapstick is the conceit that the laws of physics are locally mutable, that the world can rebel against you,

17 _{Whilst aspects of my study of interruption acknowledged impoliteness in the context of British}

culture, my study was neither culture-specific nor class-specific. I acknowledged that if I were to have made Lost for Words within a Chinese white cube space, for example, then I would have needed to apply a whole different set of tactics and challenge different norms.

or that a person can be suddenly stripped of their ability to control their environment or anticipate how it will behave (Stott, 2005:93)

I also anticipated that some participants might experience a form of mental and bodily discomfort because of their participation. What would be their survival tactics? How would they cope with the (potential) chaos of retraining the operations of the body and the mind so that they work incongruently to one another? That said, how would I as the slapstick protagonist, considering Andrew Stott’s (2005) appraisal of slapstick above, deal with performing slapstick? Would I remove myself from the process of performing the slapstick myself and instruct audiences to enact slapstick whilst I occupy another space to them to reduce the risk of me being ‘prone to attack’?

Other aspects that emerged from my analysis of Fall and Rise that I wanted to prioritise in Lost for Words related to how I contextually frame my performances. I define this as relating to how context directly impacts upon the narrative, execution and subsequent critique of what I do. This is in terms of framing a specific set of collective actions as ‘performance’ that take place within a specific kind of space in front of a certain kind of audience. An audience often comes along to my performances with very fixed kinds of expectations because of the contextual framework that is in place. In terms of Fall and Rise, audience members could be described as those who were assembled in a particular place at a particular time on such and such a date to experience an activity classified as ‘performance’ (Schechner, 2002) and on this occasion they expected a very specific form of interruption to take place i.e. when the performers run into the sea. Alternatively, passersby, in this case these persons may be defined as those strolling along the promenade, could be said to be implicated within the performance as accidental witnesses who chance encountered upon an activity that was framed as ‘performance’ and the nature of that performance involved participants undertaking various acts of interruption in public spaces. Emphasising less the potential for interruption as a tactic to produce witnesses in performance (Etchells, 1999), in planning Lost for Words, I removed any aspiration of including these ‘chance’ passerby audience members and the

an advertised event of performance within a white-cube art gallery. This location would provide me not only with a site for assembling a group of audience members of whom I wanted to engage in a very disciplined form of participatory process (a form of collective participation that would engage their bodies in interruptive processes relating to using slapstick in a directly physical manner) but it would also give me a contextual frame (performative art practice) that would prove useful in terms of analysing the final outcome of the performance in relation to thinking about aspects on contemporary art theory including Bourriaud’s (1998) perspectives on collectivity and conviviality for instance.