At the moment, developing the show with Dad seems all difficulty. Since I cannot approach it sensibly you will have to make do with some fragments:
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We have made a moderately successful - and conceptually, quite tight - 15-20 minute show (circa YaYW5, Bristol, Oct 08 / Pilot Nights, Birmingham, Nov 08). So it feels quite uncomfortable to disrupt the sequence of events we have built around the jump (1958) and the fall (2001).
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The show begun as a search for the other in ourselves - the unknowable things that are the often considered converse of memory and imagination (types of knowledge) but which might more accurately be considered part of them.
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Framing the show within a larger research project, we have put a question to ourselves: "Where We Live & What We Live For". It might be best to keep this clearly focused on father and son, but inevitably this begins to point outwardly, towards houses, inns and other buildings, walks or journeys, friendships and whichever kind of relationships that might constitute "home" or make it hospitable. But our beginnings are always shadowed by an end. Homeliness, like Selfhood, might often be considered an historical practice - even if home is not bound to an architecture or a particular geography, it may nevertheless be bound to by tradition. The conception of Home, like the conception of Self seems to require a history; one that can be, in some significant part, be known by us (though never entirely).
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This way of talking about it strays. We are being paid to make a popular show that people like, not to do Academic research (though I do consider this Practice-as-Research).
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I think about the twinkle in my father's eye, and the twinkle in his father's father's eye, and so on and I want to meet the nameless men and women, not forgotten but now entirely unknown, that might, in some way, have born as many resemblances to us as differences.
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The first toast was "to the passing of time" (and to the dead). The second toast - only implied - was to the the life of the living as he "is now, has been, and, perhaps, shall be". In the showing, the third toast was "to the other, old world, the one before us". It might never have existed before Niépce, Daguerre, Florence, Talbot, Eastman, Bayard, who taught us the trick of the instant, documenting, alongside portraits and landscapes, fractures of the rhythm of work and other business of living; I mean the Victorian Scenes where we encounter strangely matter-of-fact kinds of evidence that to the effect that such and such married so and so, begat such and such, and that they, in particular, led slowly to us. To the other, old world, the one before us. And, on the back of a documentary I once watched and a conversation with a friend, I might consider that we disrupt world prior to us and the world after, as if the world during us breaks a certain continuity that our absence reverts to.
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But straying.... when I was doing postgrad I was a wayward researcher and I like the idea of picking up another thread - searching for William, Dad's Dad, who I never had the privilege of meeting, and Olliver, Mum's Dad, who I did. Prior to the residency I had been writing about these two men, who courted and married between the Wars. But as yet we found no way of working them in.
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Much of our work concerns the impossibility of facing the past or, of being out of step with the present. The picture, below, from rehearsals in Week 2, refers to the walk that Peter, my father before he was my father, made with William, his father, in 1952, aged 17 or 18.
I notice the straightness of our legs, the bend in our left arms. In these details alone, perhaps, we are similar.
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Other Pictures:
That's All for Now. More Soon.
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