exercise in empathy
This morning Bagryana and I were talking about this conversation between her and I, and Gheorghi. Because I don’t know him, I offered the idea that the performance and work was an “exercise in empathy”. To imagine, to put myself in an other’s place, to feel.
To be yet another body on the receiving end of power.
During the work, I “danced my week” … an attempt to revist and remember the experiences, states, locations, postures, actions of my dancing week. To re-state the material. This wasn’t easy, and much of the improvisation took on a ‘searching’ mode. Looking. Beginning to negotiate a palette. Bagryana (later) offered a broad summary of the states: gentle disorientation, violence/confinement to the body, and lyricism.
We also revisited a task from the work we were doing in Sofia in which I was ‘responding’ to a fictionalised account of Gheorghi’s arrest (they simply took it). Rather than attempt to remember, I simply did the task again. This time, however, there was no brief in terms of working in a ‘literal’ way.
Later that night, sitting with Shannon Bott, she and I talked about the question of where/how to place this work. For example, to include an old-fashioned radio ‘locks in’ (or reduces) the time in which this work is occurring (or when these events occurred). At the same time, to include Bulgarian language in the work (in whatever form - written, spoken, song) also locates it very clearly. To what extent is this a good thing? Does it make an Australian audience (for example) less able to imagine the ways in which people in this land receive/experience power? How can the cultural time-place of the work remain open enough for an audience to be able to empathise? Should it remain open?
postedbysimon
