MacDonald Vincent
Traces of Her: picking up where she left off
Claire MacDonald and Charlotte Vincent were programmed into the Festival and details were included in all promotional material but due to unforeseen circumstances they were unable to attend and this performance did not take place. This is the text from the original Festival website:
We met a year ago.
She said to me, ‘I know your 28 year old body so very well.’
I am 55. She is 41.
This is how it began for us, with the sharing of a body in performance, caught on video, a performing body whose every gesture she learned, and then repeated, my 28-year old body.
A project in process, shared and initiated by two performers who themselves shared a part – Claire MacDonald’s part in Impact Theatre’s The Carrier Frequency. For performance makers who have both made and performed our own work, the restaging of work by others raises complex ethical and artistic questions of authorship and authority – but on a personal level it also offers the opportunity to begin to unpick the archive of our performance experience, sharing as we do the memory of a performance captured on video in 1985 and learned and re-performed much later, out of context, out of time, in a new time and through a different body.
Traces of Her will ask viewers to witness, take part in and respond to, the traces of a shared conversation that we began last year, and continue to have, one that winds on through letters, calls, emails and days spent exchanging performance ideas, making short films of one another, kicking over the traces of what we share and what we don’t. We don’t yet know what form this will take, except that it will be based in time, in space, and that we will be there.
MacDonald & Vincent have thirty years of performance making between them, both from the physical, visual theatre and dance traditions. Vincent has led her own company, Vincent Dance Theatre, as artistic director and performer for more than a decade and is now making work addressing the exhaustion of language and meaning, in a new ensemble work called If We Go On. Claire MacDonald was a founder member of Impact Theatre and is now and a critic, editor and writer working at the intersection of art, writing and performance.
Traces of Her: picking up where she left off
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From the original Festival website:
We met a year ago.
She said to me, ‘I know your 28 year old body so very well.’
I am 55. She is 41.
This is how it began for us, with the sharing of a body in performance, caught on video, a performing body whose every gesture she learned, and then repeated, my 28-year old body.
A project in process, shared and initiated by two performers who themselves shared a part – Claire MacDonald’s part in Impact Theatre’s The Carrier Frequency. For performance makers who have both made and performed our own work, the restaging of work by others raises complex ethical and artistic questions of authorship and authority – but on a personal level it also offers the opportunity to begin to unpick the archive of our performance experience, sharing as we do the memory of a performance captured on video in 1985 and learned and re-performed much later, out of context, out of time, in a new time and through a different body.
Traces of Her will ask viewers to witness, take part in and respond to, the traces of a shared conversation that we began last year, and continue to have, one that winds on through letters, calls, emails and days spent exchanging performance ideas, making short films of one another, kicking over the traces of what we share and what we don’t. We don’t yet know what form this will take, except that it will be based in time, in space, and that we will be there.
MacDonald & Vincent have thirty years of performance making between them, both from the physical, visual theatre and dance traditions. Vincent has led her own company, Vincent Dance Theatre, as artistic director and performer for more than a decade and is now making work addressing the exhaustion of language and meaning, in a new ensemble work called If We Go On. Claire MacDonald was a founder member of Impact Theatre and is now and a critic, editor and writer working at the intersection of art, writing and performance.