Paraules d’amor (Words of love)

A collaborative and participatory live art project, supporting and enabled by the author’s advanced approaches to relational and situational performance design. This exploratory design and dramaturgical work was undertaken as part of a creative project conceived by Catalan visual artist Núria Güell, publicly commissioned and produced by Teatre Nacional de Catalunya in Barcelona, Spain. The resulting work builds directly on the author’s longstanding research and expertise within 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 and compositional work specifically explores how the site and conventions of a ‘traditional’ theatre auditorium might be unsettled and reconfigured, to allow fresh perspectives onto unfamiliar and contested forms of material – in ways that might simultaneously contextualise and define key aspects that material’s dynamic, spatial-temporal and dramaturgical nature. In this particularly complex instance: the work invited a diverse group of people who had all experienced or been convicted of violence they consider to have been motivated by love, as they understand that, to work with a writer to articulate their passions and actions as a poem; and then sought an appropriate form for the public meeting and staged reading of those texts, within the context of a theatre programme and auditorium, by and with their authors themselves.


Research questions include:

In what ways might expertise developed within the creation of situational and interventional live art inform additional possibilities and insights within auditorium stage design?

How might advanced techniques of located and site-oriented performance work offer new approaches to theatrical staging and production practices?

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

In what ways might the behavioural assertions and choices of a stage design, if visibly performed as a central part of a work’s action and vocabulary, define that work’s functioning and meaning?