The Threat of Silence

THE QUIETUDE PROJECT - The Threat of Silence Performance A small scale practice-led research investigating the notion of quietude as a primary aesthetic precept for performance. This research investigated, developed and then applied traditional and progressive principles to the construction of a contemporary exposition employing silence, stillness and slowness as the primary aesthetic choice. The cross disciplinary work with a writer, a musician, a film maker and a performance artist/singer/dancer, attempted to identify, consider and then pursue an applied practical understanding of dynamic quietude across the different disciplines to propose a viable and effective contemporary performance practice and vocabulary. The principal questions asked whether and how the performance space might become place of refuge from an increasingly agitated human condition suffering from image and noise overload; whether and how performance might provide and provoke time and space for audiences to engage in a contemplative reflection on contemporary social and aesthetic issues? It also asked 1. What are the understandings, practices and principles that have enabled the constructions of contemporary and traditional performance forms employing quietude as a consistently dominant aesthetic? 2. What practices and discourses might be convened to enable an examination, evaluation, understanding and articulation of these principles, practices and procedures? Central to this investigation lay the need to examine how influential traditional and contemporary forms and artistic innovations move beyond the static or simplistic in their application of slowness in the staging of performance material, to produce engaging, dynamic, and critically acclaimed evocations. The research acknowledged that minimalist and post minimalist movements in art and music, offer objects and sound scores that are stripped to their essential elements. In the field of performance, however, we considered that we have yet to identify and articulate the principles being engaged in work that consciously embrace the use of silence, stillness and quietude 302 words