JO AND LUCY
Submitted by Lucy Cassidy on Fri, 26/02/2010 - 15:26
Jo and Lucy are currently working on a project that will culminate in a site-specific performance event about death, dying and society. Read more about our work at joandlucylive.org.
We are interested in the provocation of ‘the impossibility of death in the mind of someone living,’ and our capacity to acknowledge or ‘sit with’ our own mortality. We are exploring people’s different approaches to the inevitable fact of their own death and how this impacts upon the lived life.
We are at the beginning of a long-term project. Although the outcome isn’t fixed we have defined some parameters. The piece will be: live; “in and of the world” - by this we mean that it will be site specific; have an awareness about who it’s made for and how the audience meets it; performed (in a loose sense) and made with a specific group of people; and rigorous in how its form meets its content.
Our first research phase (Dec 09 - June 10) was centred around meeting with ten specialists to talk with them about death and dying. Notably we met an academic working at The Centre for Death and Society, a doctor working in palliative care, two children aged 4 and 7, a priest, a funeral director and someone who has been resuscitated. Following each encounter we made a creative response and asked our specialists to do the same. We also looked to other practitioners and artists such as Rimini Protokoll and Quarantine who working in a way we aspire to.
The next phase was a 3-4 week period of studio-based experimentation where we grew our research and some of the smaller pieces of art and ephemeral we had made in response to our meetings into imagined performances. In the later weeks we developed our favourite imagined performances: creating small performance experiments for each other; drafting texts; creating image boards; choosing music; planning out possible structures and starting to decide whom we would need to work with. We chose one of the projects to develop into a mini-performance that we showed at Residence’s Tiny Ideas.
The next stage of the project will involve deciding upon which imagined performance we want to pursue (first) and starting to make preparations. We wil undertake a three-month production phase which will include fundraising as well as finding: the site, partners, collaborators, participants, skilled specialists etc). We hope to be in a position to start making the ‘final piece’ in early 2011.
Jo makes performance and live art as a solo artist and within a number of collaborations. More information about Jo and her work is available at: http://jobannon.blogspot.com/