images courtesy of lisa furness
the feel of reverse – some questions about time as betrayed in performance
Manipulating ‘time’ has become one of the challenges of creating If Destroyed Still True. As part of the Interval open weekend at Interval, 31 College Green, we recently performed a epi-prologue to the piece that unwound key motifs and placed them in a reverse sequence. At midnight, audience, gathered by the door, met a stranger. This stranger, then moving backwards, as if in reverse, began to guide them, by a single light into the darkness.
Some questions:
does time get quicker before you die? How does this affect the pulse of the awakening moments, in our piece? In the midnight showing, the natural flopping of the freshly killed body is inverted and the performer must move from relaxed to tense. All of our bodies movements are inverted, quite often contradicting the operations of the body.
Are our perceptions of time based on experience? “how immortal we are when we are young” : what is a lifetime? Can our images show the slow drawn out nature of someone who has lived forever alongside someone who is just experiencing it for the first time? Are there pallindromic figures in the images we create?
Our senses operate in logarithmic fashion too: the heavier an object the less perception of difference there is. does this affect our perception of time? Are we less occupied with time the older it is to us.
Does time get quicker when you’re exhilirated?
Is the return leg quicker than the outward journey? If we repeat actions,
how do we show the aspect of time when novelty is wearing thin? Is there a breakdown of repetition in the piece? –Does repetition degrade? Can repetition make us disappear ?
