‘Anotherness?’: Performance with Access Lab & Library
This one-off live performance with Access Lab & Library shares the creative outcomes of a day-long workshop which brings participants together as a temporary, access-focussed collective to explore and experiment with the possibilities of intersensorial translation.
This free performance will take place at the Dr Mary Mahoney AO Amphitheatre at UQ Lakes. Following the performance there will be free food and drink. More information about what to expect on the day is available as a social story.
Acknowledgment: Jacquie or us?
I’m [F/J] and this is [F/J] … (warm remarks)
On Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Country, where we live, the traditional greeting is wominjeka. It means ‘come with purpose’. The purpose that orients us is to stand with First Peoples, with communities of people who’ve been organised into class, disability, racialisation and other identities in order to be managed or erased. To be accomplices in a real and actionable, material and psychological, political and cultural struggle against eugenics and genocide. It’s in this spirit that we pay our respects to traditional owners of this Country, the Yagera and Turrbal peoples, and to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
We recognise that for all of us in this place, our relationship to the settler-colonial project is unresolved. We offer that our relationship to ableism and access is unresolved too, and that this can be a generative truth. Today’s event is not about presenting a model of access, but it does reflect an argument that access emerges between people.
It’s an earnest attempt to share from a workshop we convened two days ago here. That workshop and this performance are experiments in how a temporary collective could create access together, and they’re specific to these people in this place.
This is an experimental publication in performance clothing. Inventions of language in search of another.
(Rather than presenting a model of access; situating the descriptive offering firmly in the subject)
[Scores for reflective/descriptive contribution during the performance] <-- FdE … Can you elaborate?
I. :)
Fd and Jon write an editorial reflecting on the experience of the reading groups and the workshop
As students of access and as subjects of colonialism, we encounter ourselves in terms like ‘ally’ or ‘accomplice’, and in both contexts — connected contexts — we aspire to be active and practical agents against eugenics, supremacy and the capitalism that consolidates them. Speaking in a sandstone university, and one that was established to commemorate a settler-colonial milestone, we acknowledge the contradictions that permeate our lives. We again nod to our friend Gabi Briggs, who has talked about how in this colony, we all exist without resolution.
Rae: how can we engage with modes of communication (language) so it’s not about clarifying but feeling - something that can shift between different senses, gaps, mistaken translations? How can captioning and image description be used in a more porous way so it conveys slippage, rhythm, embodied communication?
The unseen exhibition
Imaginary spaces
Speaking about a collection that is unseen -
We might think of image description here not only as a way of creating non-visual access, but as a discourse and creative writing practise. We will together work with ‘improvisational, conversational, critical, poetic and disruptive image description and captioning exercises, seeking to unravel the ways that artworks can be described and redescribed’.
We might also think about something that arose in the Reading Group sessions, about descriptions as sensory archives of not just works but configurations and relations of artworks.
And in the context of UQ Art Museum being in a notional ‘non-physical’ state of existence, we might also consider the prompt, or invitation, to engage with the concept of an ‘impossible exhibition’.
Describe what is seen and what is unseen.
Where does your eye go first? and next?
What is overlooked?
Who is describing; who are you describing as?
Next, we’ll develop our descriptive positions. You might …
— Imagine you’re documenting/archiving an imaginary — or impossible — exhibition
— Consider the arrangement or placement of works
— Explore the relationship between works
— Go into greater depth with your description (or extend it into speculation — into, or beyond, what is seen)
Re-calling Sally Feeding Little Cat and Mother Cat (2019)
By Sally M. Nangala Mulda
synthetic polymer paint on linen
Re-calling in the form of an improvised play, from the point of view of different parts of the painting.
* This could be a four-channel diffusion … or it could just come from one speaker …
(Performance materials folder https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/cdudd3xmivl5m77fh9hyu/AHCke4dAWdluCAVcxHC9HA4?rlkey=wcg4pj2k1ctwcp7r80fllowm8&dl=0)
Re-calling The Rainbow Experience (2021)
Blue
green
yellow
orange
red
grey
white
black.
Family,
familiar,
limbs,
step,
entangled.
Looming,
taking root,
mirrored,
eerie,
shadow.
The big shadow,
the frame,
hiding.
Spirits,
country,
heat,
cold.
Ancestors,
reaching,
observing.
Clouds,
tree,
harsh.
Tired,
tipping,
contorted,
avoiding,
observing.
Sharp,
acknowledge view
rigid horizon slow hot cool acknowledge we have roots.
Between the painting and us: The Rainbow Experience (2021)
Access is relational.
Describing what is seen, or gesturing towards what is unseen, says something about our relationship to what is seen and unseen.
It says something about our closeness to the subject, and our distance from the subject.
The Rainbow Experience by Mia Boe deals with obscured stories from her family history, stories of settler colonial violence.
One of the figures in the painting represents her great-great-grand uncle Wonamutta, an Aboriginal trooper. He was forced by colonial officers to enact violence against his own people, which Mia Boe signals by painting him with a blindfold.
What is it to meet this painting, with its brightly painted figures and sky, without this cultural context?
What would be described?
And as more context beyond the frame is shared, how can our bodies process shifting impressions?
How can our bodies process our closeness or distance to the subject of the painting,
the difference in positionality between us and the artist.
Clare and El share their positionality.
Through improvised choreography, Clare and El - individually and together - share the ways their bodies are:
- processing the imagery of the painting, and
- processing the difference between their positionality and the artist.
Imagining access to Other (2010)
Other 2010
Tracey Moffatt 1960 -
Gary Hillberg (Editor) 1982 -
Single-channel digital video, 7:00 min, edition 30/200
Collection of The University of Queensland
Positionality...?
[Jon, how can we speak to positionality re this work]
Imagining access
Fayen: We dispersed into smaller clusters, to imagine possibilities for captioning or audiodescribing the work.
Jon:
Boom boom bang bang
Eyes widening, approaches, touches, intimacy bursts
unveiling
Exoticism, Orientalism, Fetishisation
Panting, trumpeting, rhythmic music, slowly building,
tension, pulsing, handclaps
a dance extravaganza,
intensity building
explosions literally, metaphorically, musically and visually
a crescendo, rapid fire
words fail at a certain point, the pace is overwhelming at a certain point
Could we have layers of voices?
The artist’s voice, the artist’s intent, a critique of the artist’s intent
And/or
The colonial gaze
And/or
The names of the films from which each encounter between others is sampled,
“Hurricane (1979): A desperate love affair between a young Samoan chief, played by Dayton Ka'ne, and an American painter, played by Mia Farrow, who defies the will of her father. Amid this man-made tension comes a hurricane so devastating, the lives of the lovers and the entire island are imperiled.”
And/or
A person experiencing the work for the first time.
But who could this be? Whose voices are welcome?
Can a child’s impressions provide a layer, or is that excluded, given the moments of horniness as the film climaxes?
Who decides whose descriptions are allowed?
What about incorporating a jumbled layer of intrusive thoughts?
Do we give the audience a primer to help prepare them for our different voices?
Would it be like a choose-your-own-adventure?
Would we disperse among the crowd, speak simultaneously, from the corners of the room?
---
What simple, performative gestures might honour the spirit of the theatricality of the staged encounters?
Could we film something together? How could we honour the satire? How could we honour the overwhelm?
[Rae’s video, repeats the beginning but goes to x;xx]
---
Could our percussive bodies be a tool for vocalising our impressions?
Could our breath offer a tool for vocalising our impressions,
for conveying absurdity, or awkwardness,
to share what it feels like to tune our bodies individually and collectively to the work?
[Play breath first video/sound excerpt, pause when get to the title screen]
Re-calling Other (2010)
[Other (2010) final excerpt is paused where Rae’s finishes]
Four describers - Nabil, Felix, Felicity and (?Rae) - are dispersed among different PAs inside and outside the space. Timothy stands somewhere in proximity to some of the audience.
Nabil: “Closer!”
Felix: “Look!”
Felicity: “I see you.”
(?Rae?): “I feel you.”
Nabil: “Who is she?”
Felix: “Are you – my other?”
Felicity: “Who is she?”
(?Rae?): “Are you – mine?”
4 concurrently, overlapping:
“Is to touch to take?”
“Anotherness, anotherness, anotherness...”
Timothy begins the body percussiveness score in one place. He walks to another place and re-performs the score.
[Other (2010) excerpt begins to play]
The 4 describers begin to describe from different perspectives. Sometimes 2 or 3 or 4 voices will be overlapping, and sometimes the describers will create space for single voices to be heard.
Felix takes the perspective of xxx
Nabil takes the perspective of xxx
Felicity takes the perspective of xxx
(?Rae?) takes the perspective of xxx
As Timothy moves to different places inside and then moves outside the space, pausing still in each location, then re-performing the body percussiveness score.
When the film finishes, all describers and Timothy become still, and sit down/rest.