Walking, Writing and Performance: Autobiographical Texts by Deirdre Heddon, Carl Lavery and Phil Smith - Softcover

Mock, Roberta

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1841501557 ISBN 13: 9781841501550

Verlag: Intellect Books, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

This collection charts three projects by performance-makers who generate autobiographical writing by taking walks. It includes performance texts and photographs, as well as essays by the artists that discuss processes of development, writing and performance.The Crab Walks and Crab Steps Aside are performances made by Phil Smith based on an initial exploratory walking of an area of South Devon where he was taken for childhood holidays and then on to Munich, Herm and San Gimignano. Both shows were accompanied by the distribution of maps seeking to provoke the audience to make their own exploratory walks. Mourning Walk is a performance that relates to a walk Carl Lavery made to mark the anniversary of his father's death. Lavery shows how a secret can be both shared and hidden through the act of communication as he explores "an ethics of autobiographical performance". In Tree, the result of a multi-disciplinary collaborative process, Dee Heddon occupies a single square foot of soil, and discovers that by standing stationary and looking closely she can travel across continents and centuries, making unexpected connections through an extroverted autobiographical practice.The work of all three artists, taken together and separately, raises important issues about memory, ritual, life writing, textuality, subjectivity, and site in performance.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Roberta Mock, originally from Canada, is a performance theorist and practitioner. She is a reader in performance and associate dean for postgraduate affairs in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Plymouth. She is the editor of Performing Processes: Creating Live Performance, also published by Intellect books, and series editor of Intellect's Playtext series.

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Walking, Writing and Performance

Autobiographical Texts by Deirdre Heddon, Carl Lavery and Phil Smith

By Roberta Mock

Intellect Ltd

Copyright © 2009 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-84150-155-0

Contents

Introduction: It's (Not Really) All About Me, Me, Me Roberta Mock, 
Part 1: Carl Lavery, 
Mourning Walk, 
Mourning Walk and Pedestrian Performance: History, Aesthetics and Ethics, 
Part 2: Phil Smith, 
The Crab Walks, 
Crab Walking and Mythogeography, 
Crab Steps Aside, 
Part 3: Dee Heddon, 
Tree: A Studio Performance, 
One Square Foot: Thousands of Routes, 
Sources, 
Biographical Notes, 

CHAPTER 1

Mourning Walk

by Carl Lavery

Performed at Lancaster University, December 2006 Lighting: Stephanie Sims

and Nuffield Theatre, Lancaster, 1 March 2008

In performance, all text is spoken except the lines in bold in the box at the very start of the script. The dates that run throughout the piece serve to mark shifts in direction. They are usually followed by a lengthy pause. Images are similarly projected on a screen behind me. Unlike in the written text, they have a sense of duration, and last as long as I see fit. All the images were taken during my walk. However, in the live performance, I also use additional images such as found photographs of artists and thinkers whose lines are cited in the text. Thank you to Nick Strong for helping to prepare these images for publication. (CL)

On 29 July 2004, to mark the ninth anniversary of my Dad's death, I walked eighteen miles as the crow flies from the town of Market Harborough in Leicestershire to the village of Cottesmore in Lincolnshire. At the end of the journey I performed a ritual in a field. I have nothing to say about that. Certain things ought to be kept secret.

October 1981

In Autumn 1981 my Dad spent ten weeks at an RAF camp in Cottesmore. He was on a course, learning how to fix Tornado fighter planes – the newest form of military jet. He used to work on Phantoms. Once he came home with a MacDonald Douglas holdall bag that an American pilot had left behind in the cockpit. He was very proud of it, and we were impressed. We'd seen nothing like this before. It looked great. Green silk; lightweight; pure style.

But today, I'm sitting at a table trying to do my French homework. I'm bored – I don't get this. I look over at the table and see my father working at something himself. He's got a pen, a geometry set and a calculator – and it looks like he's thinking. This is strange; I'm not used to it. I guess this is what he does at Cottesmore. He seems to like it. Normally, when he comes home from work he's tired and wants to sleep before he makes dinner. My mother only cooks on the weekend. She works in the NAAFI shop at St Athan and doesn't finish work until 6 p.m. On Wednesday afternoons, I stop in and see her at work. I have a job delivering papers to the Officers' mess. She's always pleased to see me and often buys me a chocolate bar. My presence breaks the routine. My Mum hates her job. There's nothing strange about that. Everybody I know hates working on the camp.

According to an American poet:

    The chain of memory is resurrection
    The vector of space is resurrection
    Direction is resurrection
    Time is the face of recognition.

I chose this walk after reconstructing my Dad's journey with the help of my Mum. We think he probably took the M4 from Cardiff to Bristol; the M5 from Bristol to Worcester; the A46 from Worcester to Leamington Spa; the A426 from Leamington to Lutterworth; the A4304 from Lutterworth to Market Harborough via Husband's Bosworth; the A6003 from Market Harborough to Oakham; and finally the B668 from Oakham to Cottesmore.

Although I wasn't following the route exactly – the road from Market Harbrough to Oakham is a busy A road – this didn't bother me unduly. My mum had told me that he liked the countryside between Market Harborough and Oakham, and I imagined him on a Friday afternoon driving through the gentle Wolds of the Welland Valley. He always said that work was an inconvenience between weekends.

October 1994

It's a dog day today – one of the last in an Indian summer – and my Dad's taken the day off work to drive me and Melanie, my wife, through the South Wales valleys to Hay-on-Wye to visit the second-hand bookshops. I buy The Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole and something on psychoanalysis. We have lunch and a pint in a pub. Later that night, we watch Aston Villa beat Inter Milan on ITV. I wonder if he knew that he was ill as he walked around Hay.

Saturday, 29 July 1995

My father died at home, in his bed, at about 7.30 a.m. on the hottest day of a hot summer. When I walk to town to buy food for lunch later that day, my trousers stick to my leg. I've never experienced heat like this before in Britain. I don't want to move and the sun is hurting my eyes. I feel sick. I'm at the junction of Stalcourt Avenue and the Beach Road. I can see the comprehensive school – the one I went to – in the distance. It's about 200 yards away. Melanie's with me – she's wearing a dress straight out of the 1950s. It's got big red and green flowers on it. We're both hot, we're both shocked, we both feel unreal. My Dad's gone – they took his body out of the house this morning. Because of the heat, I never see his face again. We buried him on a Friday.

Wednesday, 29 July 2004

Melanie and my son Immanuel drive me to a village just north of Market Harborough. This is where I start my walk. It's a hot day – the hottest day of a wet summer. I feel relieved to get started. The thought of doing the walk has made me anxious for the past week, and I've begun to suffer from insomnia again, waking at 4 a.m. But today the sun is in the sky; the wheat is in the field; and the light is strong. And I'm wishing I had more of a language for landscape.

If I am walking, I almost physically feel the current of time slowing down in the gravitational field of oblivion. It seems to me then as if all the moments of our life occupy the same space, as if future events already existed and were only waiting for us to find our way to them at last, just as when we have accepted an invitation we duly arrive in a certain house at a given time. And might it not be that we also have an appointment to keep in the past, in what has gone before and is for the most part extinguished, and must go there in search of places and people who have some connection with us on the far side of time, so to speak?

The land between Market Harborough and Cottesmore dates from the Jurassic period, a layer of rock that runs invisibly through the centre of England from Dorset to East Yorkshire.

A geological mapping of the route: Market Harborough – Lower Jurassic – Clay/Silt; Medbourne – Marlstone Rockbed/Lower Lias; Oakham – Middle Jurassic – Inferior Oolite; Cottesmore – Lower Lincolnshire Limestone.

The Welland River marks the county boundary between Northamptonshire and Leicestershire. From there, the Welland runs to the Wash, and then into the North Sea. This is important for me. I've always lived by the coast, and feel landlocked in the Midlands. When a dreamer of reveries has swept aside all the preoccupations which were encumbering his everyday...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Intellect Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1841501557
• ISBN 13: 9781841501550
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 186
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland