rethinking why performance matters through the matter of performance
Performing Idea

30 November 2010

Nine epigraphs

Author: Augusto Corrieri



1.
‘Something happens. Or else, something does not happen. A body moves. Or else, it does not move. And if it moves, something begins to happen. And even if it does not move, something begins to happen’.
Paul Auster


2.
When we see something before us, let’s say an object, we know it is there as a result of other events and processes that came before it. For example we see a chair, and we can think of the wood, the tree, the forest, etc. We see the chair, we see that it is tangible, and we can imagine its history. But what about the space under the chair, in between its legs, the empty contours, the airy “nothingness” that hovers all around it and for which we do not really have a name? It is, of course, just as present and real as the chair itself. And yet, unable to really perceive it, this matter can never become the centre of our attention: it will always remain background, given, absent nothing. And so we are still unable to imagine the life of that which doesn’t produce a tangible object.


3.
‘Doing nothing is exactly what it's all about.’
Marina Abramovic


4.
‘When I hear Philipot’s music, something very strange happens: I have the impression that I am rediscovering modes of perception which are peculiar to me… that the composer is telling me how my faculty of perception operates.’
Georges Charbonnier


5.
The word "theatre" comes from the Greek Theatron, "the place or activity of seeing". Which means that performance is the art of the spectator, not the performer.


6.
In Dashiell Hammett’s detective novel The Maltese Falcon, a man is said to vanish without leaving a trace. The sentence the novelist uses to describe this disappearance is: ‘He went like that… like a fist when you open your hand.’


7.
Pour a glass of water into a river.
Light a match and throw it in a fire.
Go to a desert to empty a bucket of sand.
Activate a wind machine when the wind is blowing, a rain machine when it’s raining, a snow machine when it’s snowing.


8.
‘Don't change anything in order for everything to be different.’
Jean-Luc Godard


9.
Now + here = Nowhere


 

 

Augusto Corrieri, London, 29/11/ 2010

(programme notes for TanzQuartier, Vienna)

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