Fictioning Hamlet: Dialogues and Diffractions by Mirko Guido

Fictioning Hamlet: Dialogues and Diffractions is my ongoing research shared in room 402 at Linnégatan 87, the 15-16-17 May 2019, as a choreographed environment of situations and relationships. It includes participatory practices, texts, audio-video materials and live performance. These were articulated through a research process I embarked on in the spring of 2018: surprised by the sense of shame I felt when realising I did not know the story of Hamlet, I began dealing with questions about power dynamics between dominant narratives and individual imaginaries. Through the process, I increasingly applied participatory approaches, and staged situations based on strategies of ‘re-fictioning’ as a practice for the construction of alternate realities. My choreographic practice appears via the navigation of the many materials, methods and contexts involved in the process, and in the way they change, respond, and adjust in relation to each other. My idea of expanded choreography begins with thinking the work as a performance device, in which I build-in conditions where response is not only possible, it is what makes the work. My role as author is decentralised in favor of relational thinking. Ethical dimensions of responsivity, responsibility, and inter-subjective relationships lie at the core of this practice. I am committed to working responsively and confronted with and by the complexities each situation and context produce. For this presentation I aimed at making evident, explicit and present the dynamic process of intrasubjective and intersubjective relations that are at the core of this process.

The audio material consists of improvised and recorded conversations.

These conversations are the result of an invitation to take part in a role-game. The volunteer participants choose one character between Hamlet and Ophelia, and one of the proposed topics for a conversation. Through this staged situation I have been observing how the borders of whom is talking can become blurry and undefined: is it the voice of the character, of the person, of the person enacting? What interests me is how the game can produce a subjectivity that arises from the navigation between the personal and fictional character. Can the constant intra-movement between different voices, bodies and imaginaries become fluid and manifest? What spaces, imaginaries, bodies and subjectivities are produced through the multiple intra-action?

For the presentation I used the recorded audio-material to experiment with another type of staged situation. The two voices of the converser have been separated, so that one pair of headphone plays only one of the two voices. My intention is to experiment with people sitting in front of each other while listening to the incomplete conversation. What relations and imaginaries are produce by the mediated and unfulfilled encounter? If the conversation’s ‘meaning’ is created by the two voices, what gets lost in the separation of the voices? Does one isolated voice clearly carry the interaction that co-produced it? What desires are triggered by its incompleteness, by the gap and by the absence?

During the first presentation, the 15 May 2019, Peter Mills, one of the public, spontaneously decided to repeat the words he was hearing in the headphones to the person across of him. The initiative was then joined by other people in the public.

In the next days I decided to formalise into a task what Peter had done, and experiment with this other mode of interaction between, in this case, a recorded voice, one’s own interpretation and the other participant.