“Instead of acting I fabulate” -Work in progress- 2012
The project -Enlloc d’actuar fabulo- consists of the production and edit of a 20-minute performance piece, a monologue or one-woman scene, based on a video recording from 2009 where I am interviewing my father, and a work in progress where I have adapted the oral content of the video in the form of four performances. Starting from this material, which comes from a family context and is of an autobiographical nature, I aim to explore certain specific concepts such as the transmission of a memory that is difficult to make public on an emotional level. The main idea is to use the structure of a staged monologue to re-interpret and make public the memory of certain words that are documented in the video, material which the audience is denied access to, through the use of my voice. Once the performance piece has been presented it will be documented in audio format, edited in the form of a CD and will become the soundtrack of the video and the final piece of the project.
From video to performance:
The starting point of the work process, which began in 2012, was the transcription of the four hours of video material and the selection of the interview’s most representative sentences (the title of the project is a reference to one of these), my father’s ‘leitmotivs’.This selection of sentences became the titles or “billboards” of the four performances. A sonic “teaser” was also elaborated with the collaboration of the musician Simon Alexander Williams, as a foretaste of the project’s characteristics. The four performances consist of four lectures intended for exhibition spaces, where the presence of the spoken word, magnified but also blurred, the body and the voice are the protagonists of the piece. The performances all follow the same structure: a live presentation based on the delivery of a text and a blown-up sentence (leitmotiv or billboard) on the wall of the exhibition space, which functions as an image. The text is projected through my voice and through the use of visual scores which help me to transmit the words by following annotations that alter the textual content. I also use a contact microphone attached to my neck, and certain phonetic techniques, sounds, intensities, vibrations that are transmitted through my voice and help me transform the text into ghostly sounds, thus avoiding the use of the word as sole vehicle of communication. Of the four performances two have been presented in exhibition spaces during the months of April and May and the two remaining performances I am working on currently as part of the work in progress, in order to present them in the next two months.
The following people have collaborated on the intitial stage of the project: Josephine Grundy (voice work), Ariadna Serrahima (graphics), Enrique Doza (sound technician), Simon Alexander Williams (musical producion of the “teaser”) and Carla Tramullas (video and photography).