Gregg Whelan

Hello everybody
from Gregg Whelan

So an introduction -, although you've already met my 'so 1999' quip, but to flesh that out some...I spend most of my time in a collaborative performance making project (with Gary Winters) called lone twin - the work deals explicitly with notions of place (a term privileged over site, location, space...) often physical, durational, often textual - in that it has a relationship to the act of writing, or that the act of writing has at a procedural level infected the compositional dynamics of the work; I like very much Brigid's notion of 'textplans'. lone twin has quite steadily over the last 3 years or so shown work across the UK contemporary performance scene (often known somewhat mysteriously/uselessly as 'live art') and have in the last year shown and made work on the mainland (Europe) - to give a pragmatic sense of where I might be operating in terms of a field. Although lone twin very definitely works towards organised moments of showing we feel more and more, and again it's something I enjoy in Brigid's turn of phrase - that this practice, these actions, their consequences and concerns might become, construct and practice a 'place to be'. Here we find reason for our work to practically take up a lot of our time, often works will last a week, or as long as we can do it for, in an attempt for us to begin on a real sense of inhabitance. Different works are made to intra-relate with others, here we think in terms of working from within an ecology of the works own making.

Strong in the mix of the work remains an interest in colliding and negotiating the play between place as a phenomenological reality, in all of its fixed, mapped and certain geography and place as activity - place as an instantaneous set of inter/intra movements, imaginings, remembrances and ghostings - place as always having to be a performed or practiced anamnetic process. Often we kick ourselves that unlike, say, Goat Island (Chicago based performance company) we didn't name ourselves in placeful terms. Goat Island have the good function to live in and on (and I guess at times well away from) Goat Island.

Parallel to lone twin I'm trying to work on a PhD here at Dartington on place, performance and writing. Beginning initially with an interest in the relationships between contemporary performance practice and the related disciplines of ethnography and anthropology the project has now moved through into a tighter focus on attempting to find for performance a mode of writing that can hold the placeful dynamics of (a) performance in discussion. Around choreography Peggy Phelan asks 'What are the forms of writing that will allow us to hold the moving body?' - a question I think works equally well to tease out the textual approaches and economies of place, if we take place as being always 'practiced out of' a sense of performed action (like Brigid's intro' I too have a clear interest in Michel de Certeau's work on practice, textuality and place).

So I guess they're my points of interest. To end beginning I would like to go back to that quip...It did (away from its astonishing hilarity) come from a serious place. It seems to me that for a long time there has been much fascination with the in between, the liminal, the gap between states, with borderlessness - tropes that are detectable in parallel discusions around notions of 'the trace', the non-place, fragmentation and multiplicity - I have stated that my own practice is interested with the play between what 'is there' and what 'is not' - a play present in Brigid's project title, - But it seems to me that in a very real sense the movement in that play composes a singularity, a particularity, and a specificness - something definitely with borders, with position (in an expanded sense of the term) and with A place. It appears to me that practice often attempts to achieve a placeful moment, to enunciate an 'I' and join it to a 'here' - the arm carved into, the house recast in negative physicality, the great wall traversed, the city walked, the page inked or digitally configured, the body re-gendered, un-gendered and sexed. All of those transcriptions it seems to me work through a desire to locate/re-locate - to claim, to determine and to place?

So, and in thinking like Brigid that it's better to end with a question than a stop, I'll sign off
I'm very excited to meet us all

with love
Gregg xxx

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