24 hour house session
4 hour recorded performance
CHEN COHEN
VERA KORMAN
NOGAH DAVIDSON
GONI RISKIN
A collaboration between four creatives coming together for a 24 hour set time frame of creative outlet.
Fri 7 Aug 2020
16:57
Even now as we prepare for the upcoming performance- each of us in her own world. Vera next to me on the Drums. Chen just a little further ahead in the kitchen, preparing her salad.
18:46
We begin. Chen starts to slowly place mushrooms in her mouth, without biting. She then places them on her sandwich- lying ready with butter and sliced cheese. Maybe it isn’t Chen. Maybe now she is an image. Vera is on the drums, eyes fixed at no particular point. Looking in. Looking for the sound. The beat she wants to follow. The patterns she creates and then breaks
19:04
Chen knows exactly what she’s doing since this performance is a reenactment of her daily ritual. This is how she eats. The same meal. Her only meal of the day. The same four hours divided into three acts that finally lead to her eating the meal. The digestion process is slow. She takes her time introducing these foreign elements into her mouth. Getting to know them before allowing them to enter her mouth. Like sexual foreplay with her food. Suspicious and aroused from their encounter. She controls them. Brings them in only to take them out again. Designating their new position from this place to that. Like a hungry politician playing chess with his disciples. Moving them around to satisfy her own urges. She subordinates her food. States that it does not control her. Slowing the process down to hours instead of minutes. Considering her relationship to things she digests.
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19:28
This is a personal performance. A private dancer. Evoking a new relationship between the performers and the viewers. Turning us all into both performers and viewers. We perform ourselves and we watch each other. We are all expected to perform our medium. Chen by eating, Vera by playing the drums, Goni by filming and myself by writing.
19:59
The challenge is to execute our work for a duration of hours. Not to be alarmed by the noises in our heads or by the gaze. Mold our image into what we want to be. Performance is extravert. You are willing to show yourself to foreign eyes and take the risk that they either will understand your message or they won’t. Will either connect and empathise or criticise without mercy. It is a willingness to embrace your inability to see from different eyes than your own. It is a distancing from normative social relationships. Every time there is eye contact, a sudden word- something is disrupted in the performance. In the personal space that each of us is in at this very moment. Framed by our decision to keep quiet during the show. Or to keep it down to mere essentials rather than keep the possibility for chit chat open. The silence creates a space for us all to be engaged in our own practice.
Each eye contact and interaction is different- with Chen, I feel so privileged for her to allow me to enter her personal space. Her ritual. I am afraid that her awareness of my gaze disrupts her focus. Her private moment. She invited me to watch, so I feel comfortable with my presence in the small space between us. When I myself achieve focus in my writing, I am so engaged, that I barely look up from my computer screen. I hear Vera drumming. I see the other three through the corners of eyes. Only occasionally glancing for a moment. Aware that my gaze isn’t too intrusive. Aware of my body language and how it engages will the sounds and sights around me.
With Vera, she makes eye contact when she sees I am looking at her. She makes small faces. As if to check if I am listening to what she is playing. It feeds her- she is aware of my gaze and takes leverage with it to perform even more dramatically. Goni is the same. Goni dances and fools around. Eye contact is a small gesture to make a connection. She welcomes it and plays with little signifiers of interaction. When she doesn’t get feedback from the other three, if we are at that moment currently too engaged in our practice to interact with her- she performs to the camera in various positions. Like a fashion model. Exaggerating her gestures into poses. I find myself aware to her and Vera’s approach, and try to play with it a bit myself. To dramatise my actions. To express my position more fully. To take up space. But my shyness is playing full speed here. Only momentarily to I strike up the courage to perform. To exaggerate. To be expressive in my actions and not only in my words. In a respect, my performative act could be the role of the viewer. Watching the performers. If I were playing in a movie, acting as a viewer, how would I act? I would maybe smile sometimes. Move to the beat. I would not look at the camera unless it was acting as another person. Perhaps that is the curatorial role. To act as a viewer and say what I see. I find myself actively performing myself writing on a computer. A very minor act.
21:14
Vera is doing all sorts of things with the sound. At first she was watching Chen and her rhythm and synchronised her beats to Chen’s movement. Then she rehearses a certain beat or pattern. Her score written in front of her as the scars of her recent operation. Twelve meters of her intestine removed. Her stomach a traumatised set of organs. She plays the beat to the score of her scars. She tries to keep inside a pattern. Though the pattern is disrupted. Previously recorded sounds of Chen disposing herself, flushing the toilet, washing her hands. Vera plays them in the second and third act of the show in various loops to which she adds her patterns of rhythmic beats. A number of rhythmic sections coming together.
Each women’s rhythm is different. Though Vera tries to catch on to Chen’s rhythm of slow eating, she is much more dynamic in her act. The drumming in the first part of the show was strong, loud. The drums were struck with force. Gradually the drumming became more gentle. A search for understated tones. The sounds reflect on Chen’s movement. She is not overacting her meal. Eats it with no expressive gestures. The movement of her hands and face subtle. Goni’s wig is like drag. A very dramatised version of herself. A push towards freedom of expression in the dramatic sense. Chen is very simple and clean in her approach. She shows a fragment of her life. Stylised. Staged. But nevertheless gently performed. For Chen this is a very private habit shared for the first time. A public display of a four hour daily ritual that she usually performs alone. Usually refraining from talking or seeing anyone in those hours of the day.
Vera is also displaying vulnerability by presenting her scars. Presenting her technical mistakes on the drum. Pressing further to prove her bruised and battered body wrong. Pressing the limits of her physical strength by playing the drums for four hours. Goni’s photography goes back and forth between looking at us and looking at herself in the camera. She is making selfies and stories of her face covered in pink Hello Kitty’s. She is looking at our image and at her own image. Making up fantastical versions of herself in a playful lighthearted manner. I myself find awareness to a certain gaze, whether of a person or a camera, often uncomfortable. I would rather be a non-image. I brought a long piece of fabric to cover myself with to this session. I would have liked to have a tent to hide in. To only observe and write.
I try also to push myself further out of my comfort zones. To express myself more freely- not only in my writing but also in my body.
22:29
I have thought in the past that my position as a curator, at the backstage of artists works, is one of hiding behind their acts of exposure. I choose to expose myself these days in order to share a mutual experience of exposure. I order to give courage and strength to each other. To confirm our acts of self expression. Rather than a critical point of view, it is an encouragement of creativity. A space of shared exploration.
Might Chen be more comfortable with me looking at her through the television screen? Do we distance ourselves to be comfortable? Goni catches on to my discomfort at the camera pointed directly to me. She is sensitive to it and keeps a safe distance. Vera is concentrated on the beat. She has her need to be loyal to producing the sounds. It keeps her going. Gives her structure.