Where is my privacy?
Manuel, Efrosini and I went to the film, “Where is my privacy?” on Sunday (19th) at 5.30pm. The film is a bit over an hour long, and was initiated by Mette Ingvartsen, and involved Sirah Foighel and Manon Santkin. The development of the entire project (except for one ‘live’ performance) occurred on YouTube. Mette’s introduction/invitation to the other two performers (as well as the entire project) can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSYMTOJs7zc.
The premise: develop a project together using only youtube as the form of communication, and never showing each other ‘phrases’ in the videos. At the conclusion of the 6 month development, the dancers met in Paris to perform just once. They then spent two weeks cutting a film based on the youtube videos.
Early in the film yesterday I kept hearing my old Motor Control Professor saying, “So what Simon, so what?”. It seemed banal (and a bit absurd) to use a system of information sharing as a collaborative tool, but THEN to limit that tool by not using it for the sharing of movement. Also, in their programme note they talk about facebook, blogging, skype etc, but these technologies/systems have nothing to do with this project (unless you consider their absence important - which, perhaps, it is).
Strangely though (given my initial ambivalence), as I was watching I became increasingly engaged by how it was going to turn out. As I got to know the three people (as ‘talking heads’) I started to empathise, and to be curious. I became quite hooked.
Even more compelling was when the three performers sat down (physically) in our space after the film had finished. It was like I had witnessed some magical transformation from screen to stage. Not quite the Purple Rose of Cairo, but not that far off. I could see all of them (as opposed to just their talking heads), they were no longer pixelated. I felt like I knew them, and the absence of any vision of the performance in Paris was very strong. This play between the private, the (absolutely) public was conceptually coherent, and engaging.
Some other brief thoughts:
• The audience in Paris were all given recording devices to record the performance. These are all available on youtube, but I enjoyed how the live audience’s experience of the project was also mediated. Also, we saw footage of audience members fiddling with the technology, checking it, others almost oblivious to it.
• It did occur to me that the developmental process using youtube introduced a kind of ‘clipping’ (or loss of information) into the ways in which ideas are developed through engaging in ‘real-time’ dialogue.
• Mette mentioned that not having other people in the space meant she worked harder (b/c of less talk). This seemed a bit like making a virtue out of necessity. I mean, what’s to stop you just being disciplined about how hard you are working in the studio? (not that I am one to talk).
• They talked of youtube being a “public space which means you can interfere”. But is this accurate? What is meant by interfering here? Commenting on a youtube post?
• I was quite moved by the simple narrative feel to the documentary. It was conventional and yet the large variation in light, scenes, framing, and low-fidelity gave it quite a strange feel - almost a de-aesthetisation of the frame (that is not uncommon to youtube). But more importantly was the sense of just how much information was left out (or kept private in this context of the screening).
• Mette described something as being boring when it “didn’t activate your imagination”
• An audience member asked, “Do you consider this film to be a piece?”. I think I yawned at precisely the same time.
• There was a kind of fragility present in the individual ‘performances’ for youtube. At one point I became aware that one of the dancers had been watching her own youtube videos and was self-consciously trying to improve them, and how she ‘looked’ in them
• Mette mentioned the ‘idea’ of having the audience on four sides. It made me curious as to the difference between an idea and a choice or option. I would have thought that being surrounded by an audience is hardly an idea in contemporary practice - more just one of thousands of choices that can be made about an audience’s location. So, is there a difference between an idea and a choice?
