Do Something Else
Three people are in a room. They are alive. They are sitting. They are standing still. They are colliding. They are breaking. They are putting things together. They are tearing things apart. They are being. They are doing. They are doing something else.
Credits
Director / Devisor / Light / Sound:
Michael Pigott
Set / Costume:
Katja Handt
Performers / Devisors:
Cloé Fournier
Brigid Vidler
Ryuichi Fujimura
Producer:
Laura Turner
Podcast:
Dr Ari Mattes, Dr Diana Shahinyan and
Michael Pigott
Devisors – Development:
Madeline Baghurst
Nitin Vengurlekar
a fractured dreamscape of overlapping forms. Where meaning and narrative emerge from the collision between imagery, movement, text and the manipulation of the space by the performers
Do Something Else was a collaborative cross disciplinary research project that explored creating a ‘dramaturgy of distraction’ – a way of structuring a piece of theatre that articulated our propensity as human beings to always need to be doing something else. It might be best summed up in the statement I wrote for a blog called Talking Arts:
“Let us take for example, a bus ride – it could be easy to say that you get on a bus and go from home to work. Whilst you are on that bus you might have a really important thought that will change your life forever or you could just look out the window. But when you break it down, what you are actually doing on the bus is a series of overlapping things, these may not be active things but they are things you are doing nonetheless. You are:
Physically sitting in a seat that is in a vehicle that is moving very fast
Listening to a podcast
Passing a street that reminds you of an ex- partner
Suddenly feeling a series of emotions that you can’t quite pinpoint or name because you have never felt them before
Do Something Else is a piece exploring how all of these things are related in some way and it is also about how we make sense of their interrelatedness. For example- the podcast you are listening to or the feed that you are engaging with at that moment might determine the name you give to the feeling that you have never felt before.”
Michael Pigott, Talking Arts, 2016
Do Something Else was developed over a 14-month period from August 2015 - October 2019 with a team of nine artists and academics in the disciplines of dance, performance, visual art and design, media and critical studies. The range of contributors and methods of exploration forged new artistic inter-relationships between performance elements and ideas. These ideas were drawn from a wide range of texts from Deluze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, The Maltese Falcon, Satin Island by Tom McCarthy to Bruce Springsteen’s music video for Dancing in the Dark. From Paul Virilio’s notion of the accident to the Bear Cam at Katami National Park in Alaska.
Over the course of the development period we explored and experimented with performance styles both verbal and non-verbal discovering a process by which we could layer information through the interplay between performance and theatrical design. One discovery early on in the process was exploring what happened when the performers physically moved lights in the space, essentially allowing them to sculpt space with light and shadow.
Slowly the experimentation with both ideas and concepts was shaped into a series of overlapping stories of three intersecting characters that explored the relationship between humans, the spaces they inhabit and their engagement with technology. The final piece was performed by dancers Ryuichi Fujimura and Cloé Fournier and Visual Artist/Performer Brigid Vidler. Each of their characters was presented using a different set of dramaturgical devices. Movement and text combined to make meaning and this was intercut with the recording of a podcast between Dr Ari Mattes (Lecturer in Film and Media at UNDA), Dr Diana Shahinyan (Dept. English The University of Sydney) and myself, talking about the nature of accidents in film.
“It is an elegant work, but also surprising and challenging, with a confidence that allows its abstract approach to communicate with authority.”
Review - Suzy Goes See, 11 Oct 2016