This Morning
I let my tear ducts open
in the kitchen.
In between one housemate leaving,
and another arriving.
'The next five minutes (recursion)', 2020, Performance practice, for Zoom. Duration 20 minutes approx. Performed by Alice Gale-Feeny.
This performance practice developed from the context of a bedroom in a shared house during the first UK-wide lockdown. It asks how conceptual ideas and formal aesthetics bump up against felt experience.
It involves a malleable score of recursive improvisations with objects; anatomical investigations through movement, and live and recorded voice, including song.
The work considers how recursion - a process that could be described as the integration and recalibration of a model - could take place when moving with the same set of objects, in the same space. It asks how objects and the performing body present could change position, in the way that Jane Bennett speaks about objects as ‘operators’ in ‘Vibrant Matter’ (via Deleuze and Guattarri’s ideas).
In 1986, J.G Ballard said “I wanted to write about the next five minutes, not the last thirty years.”
I was interested in this as a proposition for thinking about a way of bracketing what I was doing, in the local and global context of a pandemic, by placing a focus on ‘the next five minutes’. The practice recalibrates itself in five minutes blocks. Carrying over and filtering language and experiences, moving between new objects, returning to others.
The work also adopts other languages. It refers to the pelvic cavity as a ‘bowl’ - an image often conjured in ‘Skinner Release Technique’ - a somatic practice developed by Joan Skinner in the 1970’s, which uses description and imagery to support access to sensation.
Images courtesy of the artist.
I tend to roll around
as if I had a fully cylindrical pelvis
like I had no corners.
But this is clunky, because I do.
Could I move with a bowl with edges? Could I move as a bowl with edges?
Sometimes my neck stops my head from following.