Butler International Theatre Exchange 2008
We use the word "culture" in the fields of both biology and the
arts. Exchange and difference are common to both: a healthy ecology
depends on biodiversity; plants reproduce through the exchange of
spores and pollen. Butler's annual theatre exchanges exist to
provide the means by which students, artists and teachers from
different cultures, performance disciplines and theatrical
experience can learn from and about each other.
Each Exchange is process oriented, placing the emphasis on
training and skill development and culminating in a series of
shared performances of work-in-progress to the general public.
Common to all our Exchanges is the search for the present moment of
performance. That's the thrill of it and that's what defines the
living element of performance - the unrepeatable moment of now.
John Green
Chair, Department of Theatre Butler University
Transitus Animae
I Think it Sounds Like Walking
Site-Specific Performance-Installation
(part of the 2006-2008 taboo season of work including new
writing, performance, film, installation, contemporary circus
performance)
live human voice, pre-recorded human voice, new writing, video
installation, performers, vintage and everyday clothing, black
dresses from 6 different decades, black nylon slips, undergarments,
63 yards of black tulle, umbrellas, type-writers, balloons, white
chrysanthemums, trumpets, french horns, piano, violins, guitars, 4
profiles, 4 parr-cans, sound output, 2 laptops, the book One
Hundred Years of Solitude by G.G.Marquez.
Firenza Guidi
b. 1956, Milan, Italy. Based in Cardiff, Wales (UK) and working
internationally. fire@firenzaguidi.com
"Transitus Animae. We are all just passing
through, we don't know for how long. If we care to stop for a
second. we will see our daily dance with death and the constant
transit of the souls"
- Firenza Guidi
The primary material of my art is the human element. Anything I
do, probes into what it is to be human. All art-work is a means to
discover something new about the human condition, its dirtiness,
messiness, smudginess. Its embarrassingly joyful or irresistibly
sensual side. Its darkness. Ultimately, my work focuses on death as
an excuse to celebrate life. While most visual arts tend to
dehumanise, I re-affirm the human as a yet unknown and undiscovered
island.
Transitus Animae is part of the 2006-2008 taboo season
of work: a journey and exploration into the darker side of being.
Transitus Animae particularly explores fear as the most
widespread, undetected and unacknowledged of taboos. It isn't a
freak show, it isn't voyeurism, it is the tissue we are made of and
cannot fully grasp, let alone explain. Taboo digs deeper and deeper
into human nature and whilst remaining firmly on the ground it
soars around the very thoughts humanity harbours in their heads but
cannot talk about. These are Taboos.
At the beginning of the creative process there is an idea, a
title, a vision and lots of questions. Often a mentor appears by my
side, to extend the research. To accompany and inspire me through
the journey. This time, it was Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One
Hundred Years of Solitude. I begin to create work, different
artefacts: new writing, performance, film, installation,
contemporary circus performance. In each instance, the environment
begins to enter the vision and jostle for space. On my very first
day at Indianapolis Museum of Art I explored the gardens, Lilly
House and the garden house. It was pretty and interesting, but the
space remained a passive back-drop. Then I visited the galleries.
Interacted with space, from the underground car-park right through
the "never odd or even" palindrome, and into Breaking the
Mode and On Procession exhibitions.
The spaces visited began to fester in my imagination. Back in
Butler studio my performance work was unfolding on a separate
plane, using old and new elements of physical and emotional
language which is now my own. I returned to IMA. Over and over
again. Words began to appear. On Procession made me focus
on walking as a personal or political statement. It made me focus
more attentively on our title Transitus Animae, Transit,
In transit, the passage of the souls. As different kinds of walking
were explored as performative means of inhabiting the space, the
words, spurred by the observation of how people moved in space in
IMA, began to proliferate: Walking, sleep-walking, parading,
processing, running, strolling, loitering, strutting, catwalking,
escalating, walking up, walking down, simply putting one foot in
front of another, passing, passing by, stopping, standing, staring,
sitting, shuffling, sliding, hovering. And always. Always, back to
walking. Then the performers and creative team enter the
vision with their different skills and personalities and cultures.
The mentor, be it a novel or poem or film, is a constant source of
inspiration while the montage of the piece begins to take form.
Ultimately, it is a total sensual experience. What the audience
will feel is an energy, a music, a smell, a touch, a performer
gazing right into their eyes as they search for clues. This is not
theatre. It is performance. Performers incarnate: they do not
represent, illustrate or describe. That, of course, does not stop
my performance installations from being full of theatricality. The
location of any performance is a co-player. Nothing happens, there
is no narrative, no named characters, but for an hour we inhabit
another world, one forged by the nature of the place, what we see
and hear from the performers, and what we contribute by our
presence and our own selective engagement.