Here is an excerpt from the blog for a three year project saying goodbye to Dartington College of Arts at Dartington by the last students to start the course at Dartington in Dartington. The project met for three sessions over the course of three years, each session lasted about two weeks. We thought of landscape as a memory container, as a deeper anchor for being, and as the object of an enduring love.
Year Three:
Alfie, Gionna & Harriet; Kalila, Rachel & Laura; JoJo, Matthew & Adrian
We walked in silence for 90 minutes. I neglected to stop. So long leading the march forward, so dogged, I couldn’t hear the closing bell. We found the grotto, we read the stone. We regarded our surroundings. The scales fell from our eyes. A meadow. It used to be a meadow. We drew a map of this moment (again). We found that each question had many answers. I prepared with a focus on the creative act of composing performance directives.
A performance directive is a written inscription, composed or constructed from gathered material. One of the particularities of a directive is that it is a suggestion towards a possible future or a possible performance. A performance directive is not written in anticipation of a right or wrong answer. Rather than telling how something should be done, it is an invitation. An invitation to be translated according to and depending on the person responding.
A performance directive is a creative act. It is an invitation to respond with care, to lift from ‘casual’ to ‘eventfulness’. You may want to consider it as a system of limitations that supports proliferation.
Notice there is permissiveness inherent in every directive.
Take a moment to remember a successful directive you’ve been given in the past or maybe you need to remember when you made something you loved and think back to what the initial spark was. What has been a first act that led to the discoveries that became something you were happy to work with?
Make notes on what qualities a successful directive should have.
Write a directive to bring in to the first day of the third section of The Dove, the Ghost, the Handkerchief Tree. Your directive should address three elements that make up different aspects of material to be generated: duration, speed, rhythm, content (subject), body part, materials, color, text, etc.
A performance directive is:
a form of future building
a runway for take-off
There’s a load of gravel and we are taking off our shoes.
Karen Christopher
