Interruptions, Intimations, Iterations and Peregrinations (i+ii), Adelaide, 2017

2017

Interruptions, Intimations, Iterations and Peregrinations (III+P) and III+P (reprise), Format Systems Inc., October and November, Adelaide, 2017
with Stuart Maxted and Alice Nillson
photographed by Christopher Arblaster and Melinda Rackham

Note:
Two versions of this performance were presented, 2 weeks apart, in the same space, with subtle or not so subtle differences.

There is a prescient grief haunting this writing, knowing it will not survive the experience of performance and I know this is challenging, this invitation to allow new deranged texts to emerge from the enabling constraints of the performance laboratory in spite of our bodies, our mouths, our capacities.

Virginia Barratt and Francesca da Rimini, collaborating as In Her Interior, presented 2 performances at Format Systems Inc., on Hindley Street in Adelaide. The artist-run collective was about to lose its tenancy and the III+P performance was one of the last events to happen, alongside an exhibition of works by Stuart Maxted and Thomas Moran.

The performance was an interrupted textual meander, haunted by stories of place – hindley street in particular – the site of the performance, and a street which has particular resonance for creatives. It is a street where clubs and performance spaces and live music venues and dancefloors for freaks burst into life and burn out fast. Format Systems as a home for artists was part of this lineage. The performance roused all the ghosts and gave voice to them.

” The script for the performance garnishes from fluxus, laure, the invisible committee, chris kraus. An icitic text, rhythming in bursts. A text which interrupts itself with little regard for the speaker, which wanders across time and within the space – up and down the staircase, onto the window sill, climbing the ladder from the attic, in this corner and that, on the landing, sitting in chairs … A text which veers from the prosaic to the poetic and beyond into the realm of the redundant, a text which fails to be clear, which repeats itself, a text with no idea what is going to happen, which breaks, which rustles, trembles, stammers, and which is at regular intervals cut short by unpleasant noise from a broken cassette player. This sound track, which signals when the performers should do or not do things, explodes with sound at minutes 0,1 and 3 sequentially, framing the text in a strict temporal convention, an enabling constraint which creates both formality and chaos…

The script continues haltingly, interrupted by alarms and the perennial street noise, the animal whoops and howls of drunk packs on a hot nights, invoking Hindley Streets past or Hindley Street’s past. The (hot, sweaty, bruised, drunk, stoned, queer) ghosts of the past reveal themselves in prosaic moments of storytelling to embody submerged narratives dispersed and distributed across time and space, coalescing in the discontinuous moment of performance. The space we are performing in (an artist run space) is about to close, has already closed, will be remembered again, and our storytelling will be entangled with theirs, stickily.”

Virginia Barratt

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