Re-animating dead space: the dislocation and relocation of affordances in interdisciplinary performance environments

Abstract

This work exists to challenge notions of performance-as-presentation and offer an approach that encompasses the environment: the space, its furnishings, and people. The project's roots are a belief that each individual present is involved in an event's conception, delivery, and documentation, making the environment, thus event, constantly evolving and fluid. The thesis and accompanying performances are based upon a definition of Environment informed by James J. Gibson's 'Theory of Affordances' and the creative (inter)relationships that form between the environment and an individual, that
individual and other individuals, all as constituents of the environment. The project's focus upon individuals as environmental stimuli and what they afford draws upon the performance, or event, and its relationship to the everyday the meaning of a piece is derived from what people bring to it. Due to the concept of micro-narratives and the focus upon experience rather than a grand narrative and truth, those meanings are fluid. The project adopts a practice-led research methodology in order to develop principles of composition that revolve around notions of the centre and periphery of personal experience; spatial organisation; and disassociation and reappropriation: there were six events with a focus upon the implication of these
ideas and their evolution into each event. Following observation of a poststructural emphasis upon personal experience and (subjective) micronarratives, rather than objective truth, a documentation strategy has been developed. Electronic documents and representations of physical documents are included in the eight appendices on Compact Disk. The (hi)story events have subverted the preference of so-called objective documentation strategies of audio and video recordings and prefer written experiences from each individual.