Treatise Performance South Bank Centre. 2012
Performance Painting at South Bank
Treatise is a piece of music written by Cornelious Cardew. For this performance between myself, Roger Redgate, Emmanuel Lorien Spinelli and Dancer Susanna Reccia. The idea was to create an intimate space filled with colour where Audience members could freely walk around the space as the piece was performed and experience a synaesthetic colour world and an experience of the score coming alive, and a sensory painting being created around them. This work and much of Our collaborative work in general focusses on the complex relationship between notation, improvisation and the physicality of performance. Mark Sheerin wrote in his acclaimed Blog “There’s a delicate balance between civilised and riotous in this film”.
The performance felt like creating a jigsaw where all the pieces come together as a whole at the end. It seemed each of us were negotiating a sense of chaos. The painter Amy Sillman says in her essay about Colour “Let us Welcome the collision of Mistakes, Accidents, desires, contradictions, destruction and possible disasters that colour embodies.” It seems that somehow we find the balance from inside Cardew’s score.
The performance seemed to open up a new landscape of possibilities in how to connect with gesture colour and sound.