Projecting Performance
A Brisbane Performance Art Festival at Queensland College of Art Gallery
WORK-TO-SCREEN promised from the outset to be a veritable oasis in the midst of a desert. The agenda for performance works in Brisbane has been severely curtailed since the demise of John Mills National in late 1987, and the WORK-TO-SCREEN project, co-ordinated by John Stafford at the Queensland College of Art Gallery in September, allowed the participants a brief and reviving drink at the fountain.
The oasis of the gallery may not have been surrounded by a fringe of verdant fronds but it did display a wealth of technical supports that formed their own landscape of delights - and difficulties, for it was this landscape which both the performing and the perceiving body had to negotiate.
Issues such as these were tackled in the lectures by Anne Marsh and Urszula Szulakowska, and a concern with the relationship of the body to technology emerged in the performances of One Flat/O'Flate, Tim Gruchy, Virginia Barratt, Adam Wolter, Hiram To, Eugene Carchesio, and Boys Own Adventure.
We are all aware of the effect mechanisation has had upon human labour, and the situation is reflected in performance art. Does the body become redundant within the emerging garden of technical delights, or is it enhanced? This question was particularly evident in Per Chance to Dream by Tim Gruchy. Gruchy used computer sequenced slide projectors to produce a complex image/pattern backdrop against which he moved, dressed in a reflective white costume. Although his multiple projections and bodily movements are intended to be lyrical and seductive, they also suggest the entrapment of the performer's body in the projected dreamscapes. This was most poignant in that part of the performance where the body simply disappeared into the mechanised... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
Tim Gruchy, Per Chance to Dream. Photo: Jay Younger.
Virginia Barratt in Times’ Best Jewel. Photo: Jay Younger.
