Research Context: Original Version

Description 

A highly political, participatory, live performance installation, that took place over eight days at the Unfuck my Future. How to Live Together in Europe festival in Frankfurt am Main. Developed during a research residency at Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, Frankfurt am Main. 

Aim

The work had a set contextual framework that was provided by the festival’s title and topic, Unfuck my Future: How to Live Together in Europe. This context was then confirmed and supported by the curatorial decisions of Valerie Göhring and Matthias Pees. It was in this context, supported by the curators, that we began our residency. Drawn from the research question: “How do you make a piece about Europe and about Brexit without talking about it?” The aim of the piece was to develop ‘songs’ using game structures that could reflect aspects of the “living together in Europe”. These ‘songs’ were then further framed by thinking through aspects of Trennung (roughly translates to separation) and togetherness. It was important that the work was participatory, allowing a direct contact with the game structures we designed and creating a departure point for audience members to reflect on and discuss the provided context. 

Process

Working with Ripchinsky to cross-examine decisions made against the concept and conceptual framework ensured a rigorous collaborative process. The research was cyclical and reflexive, involving periods of active practice-based research followed by reflection, leading to further active creation. This provided a crucial distance and self-critical stance. We consulted with expert dramaturgs Mira Moschallski and Nele Beinborn for critical feedback at each stage. 

The work was performed for approximately five hours per day for the eight days of the festival. This process maintaned the research method above described, ensuring rigour across all aspects of the practice-based research. 

Trennungssongs of Togetherness was publically funded via a research residency at Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, which is “recognised internationally as one of the most influential and successful independent production centres” in Germany. The process of securing this residency served as an initial informal peer review of the concept and proposed methods. 

Outcomes

Trennungssongs of Togetherness offers an alterative to strictly language-based approaches to dealing with 'the political' in art, without the need to compromise personal, collabrative and artistic intentions. The work explores the nature of what, how and when artistic concepts are (or can be) communicated to an audience via performance. It demonstrates ways and means of utilising given frameworks to contextualise the work. It further offers insight into the potential for performers to act as facilitators in participatory work. The work offers strategies to challenge the frequent criticism of participatory work as confronting, exposing and alienating. It develops the notion of conceptual music as an expanded field that goes beyond sound, broadly redefining the ‘song’ as an interdisciplinary form that includes text set according to organisational/compositional means.

This highly political work explores its territory through performative rather than verbal means. This creates subtle shifts in the possibilities of how art can communicate its concept to the audience. The work leaves the final responsibility for drawing knowledge, meaning, and conceptual content out of the work in the hands of each individual audience member, or each temporary familial group of audience members who travel both individually and together through the work for as long as they wish. These temporary social constellations, which occur through the act of playing both separately and together, highlight a unique performance situation where notions of ‘appropriate’ behaviour from both the confines of ‘the everyday’ and ‘the theatre’ collide and contradict leading towards artistically and discursively productive ‘out of the ordinary’ situations. 

The performers facilitate the work. Audience members are welcomed into the space and offered to choose one of the songs to watch/listen too, join in with, or play alone. This immediate choosing that is required of the audience highlights the specific nature of the participation that is expected throughout the performance. The work is democratic, but in a very European way. The performers reserve the right to veto any decision, to state their wishes and to encourage, support, contradict or even coerce the audience. The process of choosing is then further democratised by disagreement between audience members or even between performers. The conceptual framework, before any ‘song’ is even chosen, performs aspects of living together in Europe. Every fibre of the work is conceived in active refection of the conceptual framework. Whilst in the space, consciously or otherwise, audience members and facilitators are performing about Europe and about Brexit without talking about it. 

This work is dealing with perhaps the most visible issue that confronts every person currently residing in the United Kingdom. It demonstrates the key role that art can have in contributing to the encompassing discourse surrounding the United Kingdom's exit from the European Union. Further the work demonstrates an effective performative approach to the subject offering new models for practice-based contributions to what might typically be considered the realm of more traditional researchers. The methods and rigour of practice can be considered role models to researchers exploring similar approaches to dealing with any discourse.   

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