DUELLE
Choreographers & Performers: Deanne Butterworth & Shelley Lasica
Photographers
Premiered: 2009 at Centre for Contemporary Photography
DUELLE is performed by Shelley Lasica and Deanne Butterworth with rehearsal director Joanna Lloyd.
DUELLE brings together two solo performances made 16 years apart. It is a work that recognises time slippage, the resonances of different dances that exist at different times but can happen simultaneously.
BEHAVIOUR was made for run gallery Store 5 in 1993 - and given the nature of the venue - it was perfect for a performance that was performed close to people without being threatening, yet maintaining a critical distance. BEHAVIOUR created a different theatre space.
Dual Repérage was first performed in April 2009 for the ‘With the Lot’ event, an outdoor project curated by Kyle Kremerskothen, for Lucy Guerin Inc. It plays with sensing the unseen, presenting different activities that viewed from a specific and then changing reference point.
DUELLE allows the audience to find the formal and historical conversation between the two works. Both works were made for spaces ‘outside’ the regular performative environment and because of that allow an exaggeration of that very moment. The audience is close, the relationship negotiated, and by doing so, expressed. The photographers’ presence as part of that relationship heightens the moment: of time, the stage, the performer, narrative and metaphor.
Many thanks to Roger Wood, Rachel Young, Rohan Young, Naomi Cass, Mark Feary, Kate Neylon, Tracey Hubert, Ben Speth, Joanna Lloyd, Kylie Walters and Florent Otello, Terence Hogan, Dominic Redfern, Concettina Inserra, Patrick Pound, Matthew Gingold, Shelley Lasica is represented by Anna Schwartz Gallery
image credit: Milo Kossowski
http://www.ccp.org.au/news.php?id=103
http://www.flickr.com/photos/48576081@N04/sets/
photo: Concettina Inserra
Duelle Purpose, by Ben Speth
Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up and thicken the environment we recognise as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.
Susan Sontag, On Photography
It was my intention to document Shelley and Deanne as they warmed up for Duelle. It is one of my favourite parts of a show and because it interests me, I thought it might interest others: A record of them choosing their outfits, stretching, gossiping, moving about the space, marking; doing all the things that performers do before the performance, before they become performers; the transition from one of us into one of them. But, due to a flat battery and, I must confess, a nagging disinterest in rendering images, I have instead chosen to render a few words regarding the potential inherent in combining live performance and photography.
I remember the day as a sunny one, I got to CCP early after enjoying another body of work at Conical, up the street. Shelley and Deanne looked lovely – they are always very well turned out. I cannot remember exactly what they wore, and because I am writing this without the benefit of referencing a photograph, I will just have to relate my having experienced both pleasure and some envy at how they were dressed. I certainly don’t remember what I was wearing but, since I rode my bike, most likely, I was dressed casually and was perhaps a bit dirty.
Shelley and Deanne are friends. Last year, Shelley saw Deanne do a solo that reminded her (Shelley) of a piece that she’d done some 20 years previous – this is what I remember Shelley telling me right after seeing Deanne’s show. So Duelle is partly occasioned by memory. To give further form to memory and its relation to time, Duelle was performed with photographers - Dominic Redfern, Matt Gingold, Patrick Pound, Concettina Inserra, and Annie Wilson - in galleries 1 and 2 at CCP.
These two galleries are 2 corridors that intersect to form an ‘L’. If you were not at the corner where galleries 1 and 2 met, you would not have been able, much of the time, to see both or sometimes, even either, performer. So most of ‘us’ moved about as much as possible so as to be able to see ‘them.’ As Shelley and Deanne moved here and there, we would follow and then they’d turn on us and we’d be unable to keep a respectful distance; an embarrassed smile met the rehearsed blank visage of the trained modern performer. All this contingent movement made a ‘them’ out of ‘us’. That is, we all became performers and performed, watchers and watched.
Speaking of watchers and performers, the photographer’s movement, because it too was contingent, could also be considered choreographed, part of the show. Watching them work, listening to the rhythm of shutters, breaths, and footfalls (is there an experience of time that is not accompanied by some sort of rhythm?) I began to ‘see’ what they were seeing. That is, I triangulated, and to the best of my ability, saw and identified with what it was they were trying to see, trying to do. This effort expanded to include those not consciously performing: to see and try to imagine what others might be experiencing, and for a moment, my self grew lithe and graceful and moved – danced – from subjectivity to subjectivity.
It is easy for me to imagine the corridors – the trajectories - that intersect to make that ‘L’, shooting off into space and time for the life spans of both artists, and that the intersection of galleries 1 and 2 was our intersection of space and time. Thus, this show – that is, our show – became a sort of rumination about time. And isn’t an individual’s sense of time culturally inculcated?
Which brings us to the Sontag quote. While I think we have put to good use her musings on photography and experience within the context of Duelle, we’ve still to wrestle with ‘…objects that make up and thicken the environment we recognise as modern’ (my italics). So, who are ‘we’ and what do ‘we recognise as modern’ within the context of Duellle? That both Shelley and Deanne have been influenced by an arm (a corridor?) of modernism is undeniable. The work done by Simone Forti, Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer and Douglas Gordon at The Judson Church sounds still. But that is but one form, telos, iteration of modernism. There are many more.
What do we mean when ‘we’ say ‘modern’; what kind of historical, technological and cultural assumptions are ‘we’ making? What if Shelley and Deanne were not of European descent – were aboriginal? What if they performed outside, under the sky, in the bush but still surrounded by photographers? How would ‘we’ watch this performance? What sense would we make of the heritage of the dance and its history of investigating quotidian movement? How would ‘we’ be there - would this diversity inhibit ‘us’? Is it fair to ask these questions of this work – or of any work?
This is not a criticism of Duelle or the CCP mailing list; what I am talking about is bigger than this.
Because I was listening and watching us – those whose role it was to dance, those whose role it was to photograph, and those whose role it was to watch - become an ‘us’, I became aware of who ‘we’ were and consequently, what we weren’t. We weren’t a very diverse crowd. I mention this because I am a white artist, I live and work in Australia, and as such am part of an Anglo dominated divide.
There is always something optimistic, if not utopian, at the heart of every live performance. For a show to present so many possibilities – so many potentialities – in such a divided society, makes me want more - from ‘us’.
