Text and Jude Walton's Seam
The integral role of text within the body of performance work made by Jude Walton over the last twenty years demands a detailed investigation. While this brief article cannot offer such an investigation, I hope, that by discussing her latest work Seam (I 998), to outline a relationship between Walton's practice and the production of text that may be relevant to the experience of her other projects. I suggest demands a detailed investigation not in the narrow sense that a study of the relevant texts may proffer an exegetical understanding of these works, but, rather, that when such a study is undertaken, it will acknowledge the valuable contribution her work has made to the discourse around the vexed role of text in contemporary performance.
Text serves two functions in performance work: conceptually, to generate and structure material, and verbally, as oral and visual elements within the performed work. In both cases, Walton embraces text intertextually , thereby establishing a structure from which a new work- her work- may emerge. Seam, for example, is derived from Walton's close reading of Les Noces d 'Herodiade: Mystere by the nineteenth century poet Stephane Mallarme. 1 Although the performance incorporates spoken passages from Mallarme's fragmentary verse drama, Seam is not a performed version of the Mallarme text.2
Whilst reading Herodiade, Walton is actively making a work. In terms of specific text, a series of notes that accompany the never completed poem are used in the performance. The notes are employed in both the original French, and in a new English translation... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline