Transience and permanence, the constant
Monuments + sculpture – marking in time making valid – heaviness
Transience – ephemeral, nebulous – lightness
And audience
Experience of art – the transient nature of the encounter = becomes validated by memory and the quality of experience
How it makes you feel
What you feel is how you remember. (Often attributed to Maya Angelou – ‘…people will forget what you said, they will forget what you did, but they will never forget how they made you feel’)
Transience is moving, through time, moving on from, beginnings and endings, here and gone
Permanence is stillness – rocks, monuments, weightiness, significance
But in theatre / improv audiences experience of something fleeting – the encounter feels special, unique, personal
It is a two way relationship. Not standing in front of. But dancing with.
Theatre and improvisation know about the value of transience to audience. And specifically the shared experience of the moment. The audience completes the work.
Museums, archives, monuments, the canon of gold framed paintings, arguably most 2D visual art and all sculpture – deal with fixing in time, history, longevity, statements. (There is hierarchy at work here – power – who choses what is permanent?)
Ceramics in particular is elemental – earth and fire. Survival of Mesopotamian pots – trace of man’s first technological advancement – but also evidence artistic expression. They tell stories.
Which is where theatre meets because it tells stories.
Time tells stories – beginning middle and end.
Without end – no story…?
Or without end – audience completes story?
Where is the audiences agency in the work – this is crucial to me.
Gilchrist – where we put our attention…attending as a moral act which changes the world…who does the attending?
Artist role to draw attention. To focus – to say look, here? At what I see?
How do you leave space?
Notion that when we accept that there is no permanence that everything is changing, we are freed from fear of death and endings – Buddhism.
Gruf Rhys –
“Rocks are slow life”
Even rocks are moving, changing.
Climate disaster, landscapes shifting, mud moving…clay and earth subject to the elements.
Toute Bouge (Everything moves / is moving) – Jacques Lecoq text
Lecoq students study elements – physically.
Presence in the theatre feels and looks like stillness but isn’t stillness, it’s kind of a vibration. It’s an energy.
You can teach it to actors by making them play Grandmother’s Footsteps – when the child is forced to stand ‘like a statue’ – they are in fact holding themselves in preparation for immediate movement when Grandmother’s back is turned.
Watch a cat pretend to not be about to catch a bird in the garden.
What personally does this mean for me?
Theatre, improv
Writing
Making
Clay
Artmaking
Alex Murdoch, Artist 