One thing follows another
20-23 August, Performance Space, Carriageworks, Sydney
Anything can follow anything else providing nothing is taken as the basis.
“Music / for the dance / to go with it
…living in the same town
finding life by not
living the same way”
John Cage, Composition in Retrospect, 1993
One thing follows another… is a negotiation between the art forms of dance and music. Jane, Angela and Lizzie do not always dance to Gail’s music and Gail does not always make music to dance to. This balancing act of independence and collaboration is played out with more than a nod to the Fluxus movement and 1960s avant-garde artists such as Yvonne Rainer and John Cage, however these ideas are re-embodied and re-interpreted through our contemporary modes of performance.
The shared element of dance and music is time and this forms the conceptual core of the work. There is a time-based score and each segment explores different compositional strategies for music and dance, with the overall intention to enhance the audience’s experience of time passing. Over 56 minutes dances are found, music takes form, water is poured, fruit is eaten, the floor is swept, poems are written, snap is played and a cake is cooked. One thing literally follows another, the tasks and dances falling in and out of one another.
Due to its task-like nature One thing follows another… is a playful work—a kind of game. Theatrical artifice is stripped away to show the audience both an entertaining performance and the processes of its making. It is about being in the moment, then in the next moment and then the moment that follows. Perhaps it’s best described as a gathering of people who share 56 minutes of their lives together, the making of music and dance filling time and empty it, in order to feel its passing.
Concept & Research: Gail Priest
Co-creators: Jane McKernan (choreographer), Gail Priest (composer)
Performers/devisors: Angela Goh, Jane McKernan, Gail Priest, Lizzie Thomson
Video Consultant: Samuel James
Lighting Design & Production Management: Clytie Smith
Research & Reading Matter
The audience received a handmade booklet of reading matter comprising fragments of research material including quotes from John Cage, Morton Feldman, Yvonne Rainer, Catherine Wood, George Brecht, Jacqueline Bass and Ken Friedman, as well as scores, instructions, mesostics. Each 20-page book was randomly paginated from a selection of 40 pages rendering each book unique. The audience was encouraged to consult the reading material should they become bored by the performance and during the 1-minute interval.
As part of the research for this project I also undertook a 6-month blogging project:
My Year of Fluxus Thinking.
See also review in RealTime
Photo Gallery
Photos by Lucy Parakhina
See documentation from Creative Development 2012
This project was presented by Performance Space and supported by Arts NSW, the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the arts, its arts funding and advisory body, the Creative Practice Lab in the School of Arts and Media, UNSW, and University of Sydney Performance Studies.
