Abstract

A practice-as-research enquiry into the materiality of memory, Sit with me for a moment and remember is a site-specific, one-to-one performance on a bench that considers staging loss. Using sound and performance, the piece creates an intimate space for audiences to inhabit memory and explores how we perform commemoration and commemoration performs.

Research aims:
1. Use performance as a means to examine ‘staging loss’ and commemorative acts
2. Explore collaborative processes that test conventional delineation of artistic roles
3. Reconfigure relationship between audience/performer as one-to-one performance
4. Develop dramaturgical strategies for working with children and family members

Sit with me for a moment and remember is framed by dramaturgical investigation into collaborative processes of making one-to-one performance and working with different sites (e.g. galleries, theatres, parks, cities) and voices (male, female, gender-neutral, old and young). The bench piece’s dramaturgy, like memory itself, is ‘a made thing still being made’ (Williams, 2010) as it evolves with each iterative one-to-one encounter.

The piece challenges Bottoms’ description of ‘conceptual drama’ that is ‘authorized by the audience’ (2006) by suggesting that the work is rewritten by each new participant. The project’s dramaturgy follows Barba’s notion of ‘a weaving together’ found and fictional texts about remembering with reference to personal and national acts of commemoration e.g. the two-minute silence on Armistice Day. This is discussed in more detail in the conclusion of Staging Loss: Performance as Commemoration (2018).

An article in Performance Research (2018) discusses an iteration created specifically in collaboration with the artist-researcher’s children, exhibited in galleries and theatres in 2017. The text, when spoken by the children, ghosts their mediated presence into the space and questions audience’s individual perceptions of family, memorial and loss.
Cited by The Guardian and The Sunday Times as one of the best performances of the Edinburgh Fringe 2018.