Recently I've been combining the statues exercise with a response to visual art.

Arthur Boyd:

Guo Jian:

Donald Friend:

and others. It's been liberating. After doing the training this long, the challenge to achieve the form of the exercises, seems to have become insufficient. Maybe I'm bored, or maybe I've lost the ability to examine my own technique. Whenever the statues exercise is taught, the analogy of the sculptor creating an aesthetic from a piece of stone is used. That the artist can see the statue even though they are looking at a hunk of rock. The process of cutting away is a process of trying to reach the kernel, the essence of the idea that they see in their mind's eye. And so if you look at just one tiny part of the statue you will be able to experience the whole. That is if the artist has been successful. So the statues exercise is framed in terms of visual art in the first place. I don't think I'm stepping too far away from the basic tenets of the exercise in using these prompts. I once heard a member of SCOT say that just before they strike a statue they might be thinking of an adjective like red or black, or compressed or stretched, push or pull, front or back. Like it was a condition that was put in place before the statue was struck. In that sense, it's pre-meditation. But why should we be so obsessed with spontaneity anyhow? Spontaneity is merely the act of staying within the moment. The steps, the dialogue, the sequence of a performance are all pre-determined but each night they are performed as if for the first time. So I guess I'm bringing that ethic into the training. So I've been choosing just one painter per night. I look at quite a few of the paintings and I try to study details, or get things that strike me, that inspire me. Then when we do statues, in those moments in the ready position, I let the feeling of the painting invade me. As though the inspiration behind the painting is the state of potential for the next statue. I've been excited by the results. One of the ideas behind doing statues is that an actor can notice well-worn habits. 'Oh my god, how many times can I do that statue where the hand is bent like that and the head is tilted'. But with this injection of visual-art, those very technical ticks have been dropping away. It's as though all parts and each moment holding or moving a statue have found a single spark. I suppose it means that statues on a given night will not be distinct, rather a series on a given theme. I guess I'm okay with that. I could explore this line for a while couldn't I?

visit to project space at RMIT

I walk into a cold display room. There are various structures predominately made from wood, mostly from dressed Tassie Oak. An entrance ramp, steps into the main living area (with a closet to the rear – very disused looking – like storage that needs tidying up. Arrayed around the main living space are the bedroom boasting a four-poster bed chained to the wall – though all I have to cue my imagination of the artefact of cosy manchester is the remaining bed-head grill tethered into the plaster. A narrow shallow cupboard hangs strips of black rubber of split inner tube dimensions... the remaindered clothing of absent lives. A narrow over-long, flower window box with a discarded pestle balanced on the upper edges – empty of soil – as though the oak were form-work for a long abandoned concrete pour. A spear of wooden doweling leans against the wall – in the old days, the children wielded this like ancient samurai, or pulled either end in a splinter-filled tug-o-war; now it rests forgotten and prefabricated. A French-braced portal leading precisely to the plaster wall less than a metre behind leads me further to my sense of frustrating abandonment – where are the inhabitants of this hastily, carelessly constructed reminder of domesticity? Why did they leave me here to ponder the inadequacies, the broken hopes and bad mistakes. To deepen my malaise, the family stereo system plays not Bing Crosby's White Christmas; in fact so soft were the sounds reproduced that at first I had to press my ear against the speaker to check that it was working. It was. A feeble electronica feeding off the ambience – so I understand by the contact and omnidirectional microphones - they record and reproduce not only the air, the percussion of life all about, but the absence of activity within: so I listen to the suddenly strident, subversive nothingness sublimating my drab daily life to the terror held just beneath the skin of my being. These structures are not made to last, no tenon and mortise, no rebate or dovetailing, just one member pressed against another at a serviceable angle to hold the form erect – although like none were expected – if it were to receive a knock it would fall. I note that the odd assortment of screws used to house these sentinel molds have been countersunk; I can only guess this is some ironic jibe at the permanence of dovetailing... for what is the point of joinery that outlasts its users?- these slap-dash structures of impermanence are referencing a bygone era when a structure was built to last. In a jolt I realise that everyone outside has been looking at me through the wall of glass fronting onto Cardigan Street – the lone figure in the display room of modular domesticity. Thursday afternoon in the RMIT precinct; an adolescent impresses his female friend with slurpee, bitten cigarettes for toughness and solid shoulders – he doesn't realise he has the genes to gain weight yet. A courier admonishes me for waisting time with his stare then reasserts his employment with the inventory slip. I return to this desultory space, but can't stomach anymore, can't negotiate this uncompromising world... not even the entrance ramp looks sturdy enough to hold me so I must exit skirting about it. Nothing was real in there. Reacquire the comfort of closed skin... now, back to real life.

non-negotiable
Katie Lee
Dean Linguey
Bridie Lunny
Exhibition Friday 24 September to Thursday 14 October 2010

Learning Testimony by Graham Henderson for the Melbourne Fringe

"Testimony" by Graham Henderson, directed by Suzanne Chaundy and performed by me will premiere at the Melbourne Fringe September 2010. A fifty minute solo performance piece "late-show of demi-god dreams" runs the release.
I've tried a different process of learning text for Testimony. Ordinarily I think the thoughts and speak the lines out loud in my bedroom, or whisper them to myself on trams and avoid the stares of fellow passengers. This time I decided not to vocalise the text until I'd learnt it.The idea was that rather than to rely on the muscularity of producing words with the elecutionary muscles, I would just think the thoughts. In performance this might help to focus on the rationale of the whole piece. After all, the performance is about an hour of layered poetry that looks at the labyrinth of the self in the context of one who is ostracised from normal society; the myth of the minotaur becomes an analogy for the monster within the self at one in the same with the fear of the stranger in society. A subtle complex exploration that requires the performer to consider each point of reason as it transpires, so that the argument of the performance builds with logic. If the logical build is well-constructed then the emotional and dynamic journey will come for the ride. I'm now two-thirds of the way through learning, have started text analysis with Suzanne (the director), and I couldn't bare the torture any further. I had to speak the words. It interested me the stages of personal relation to the text that transpired. At first I found the text immensely difficult to learn. Without the confirmation of the act of speaking, the words didn't seem to stick. And occasionally I would catch myself mouthing words. But gradually I became accustomed and enjoyed the freedom of walking the streets of Collingwood/Fitzroy or riding on a tram with a page of script in my pocket stepping through the text in my mind. But last week, after a month of learning, I couldn't continue. I merely had to speak the lines. And wondered why I should torture myself in this way. I spoke. The release that I felt in doing so was cathartic. And the voice of the character was a music to me. Not that I feel it was misplaced to explore that non-vocal process, in fact now that I am talking out loud to myself in my bedroom committing the lines, I value the icy concentration that the original process has engendered – the development of rationale continues though the practice of cadence associated with meaning – weighting words as I've come to call it.