12 Last Songs

A major long-term collaborative and participatory public performance project, supporting and enabled by the ongoing development of new approaches to behaviour-based and situation-responsive performance design. This exploratory project work, and its public and industry outcomes, manifest the accumulating development of a semi-improvised durational scenographic lighting design. The resulting design is both conceived and visibly performed by the designer, amongst and as part of the unfolding events of a twelve-hour participatory theatre work – simultaneously contextualising and responding to the details of that work, in ways that define key aspects of its dynamic, spatial-temporal and dramaturgical composition.

The project builds on the author’s longstanding research and expertise in situational and participatory public art practices; and further expands their ongoing contributions and impacts within considerations of the performance of place, performance as place, and the activation of reflective social situations through performance. The research being manifest through this design work specifically marks a significant turning point within the longterm trajectory of the author’s twenty-year creative collaboration with theatre research company Quarantine, drawing understandings developed through the author’s behavioural and durational live art practices directly into the formal context and site of Quarantine’s large-scale theatre work.

Research questions include:

In what ways might expertise developed within the creation of situational and interventional live art inform approaches to immersive and durational theatre?

How might advanced techniques of located performance practice reveal new approaches to theatrical staging and production practices?

How can performance design be conceived and constituted as a field of activity, rather than simply as a spatio-temporal architecture?

How might the behavioural needs and choices of a performance design be engaged to directly activate and sustain its event and situation?

In what ways might the act of lighting a theatre work, if visibly performed as a central part of that work’s action and vocabulary, define its functioning and meaning?