Stream, a new cross-art performance from dramatic group, Optik, is described as ‘a relationship between music, technology and live action that evokes emotional thoughts and memories in the spectator.’
According to Optik Director Barry Edwards, the cast – a viola player, sound mixer, video mixer and three performers – interact intuitively together and this invites the audience to respond to, and even control, the performance.
If that sounds confusing, it still is several emails later… But the event is not meant to be straightforward: Edwards is drawing on a technique he has been exploring for ten years.
‘I have developed a technique that enables performers to have a framework of action, but within that a freedom to choose one action over another,’ he explains. ‘I urge performers to do what they want to do and to try and act without too much reasoning. In this way, the performers can explore a lot of emotive stuff normally out of bounds in performance.’
‘This happens for the spectator too, who cannot read what the performer is doing in any normal way,’ Edwards adds.
The ‘framework of action’, in this sense, is provided by the musical and visual backdrop. Ben Jarlett operates a granular synthesiser to pick up live sound from the performance space, including from violist Billy Currie, which is then processed and projected around the room.
Meanwhile, live video artist Howie Bailey manipulates video and captured loops in real time, using a camera, a computer and live footage to project the visual backdrop to the performance.
So how do the other performers fit in? Simon Humm, Jennifer Lewin and Clare Allsop share the opinion that the performances feel very personal. ‘I am a performer. I act, I explore impulses, reflexes. I am me,’ Allsop says.
‘It is about impulse, about rhythm, interaction, exploring and taking risks,’ Lewin comments. ‘When I perform, I am me, I am not hiding behind the costume, make-up or words.’
For Humm, there are no particular boundaries to his performance. ‘Am I an actor? A dancer? An object? Or just a projected image? Or shadow?,’ he questions.
Humm seems acutely aware of the audience response: are they inquisitive or smiling, confused or angry? For him, it is about illiciting and recognising the response from the audience in the search for ‘a moment.’
With so much improvisation taking place, the performance is abstract and audiences will thus view snapshots, rather than following a particular narrative. And, like viewing any kind of abstract artwork, viewers will also be able to project their own meanings onto the work.
‘I used the word “stream” to hint at “image stream”, “streaming” and “stream of consciousness”,’ Edwards explains. ‘The performance slips between narrative, image, melody and rhythm, in a way that we don’t actually control. The spectators actually control their own editing of the piece as it happens, in a way.’
Stream is Optik’s first performance in the UK since 1996. Over the past seven years, the group has worked on a number of projects around the world through international partnerships, culminating in performances in Berlin, Prague, Helsinki, Alexandria and Köln.
The last two years has seen the group concentrate on workshops and performances as part of larger scale residences in Sao Paulo, Brazil in 2000 and Belgrade in 2001.
Formed in 1982, Optik first began touring the UK with performers such as Clive Bell, also know for his association with improvised music organisation the London Musicians’ Collective.
‘Optik began life in the early ’80s, when the visual side of performance in the UK was just beginning to be explored,’ Edwards comments. ‘It was a great opportunity to work with sculptors, 8mm film, ‘style’ objects. But the visual ‘bubble’ couldn’t last – at least not in live work,’ he continues.
‘In a back-to-roots kind of move, I started working with intuitive performer actions, picking up some of the raw threads from my early work with the Ritual Theatre some twenty years previously,’ Edwards says.
‘It felt right, though in the early days of this work, completely mad, out of place, going the opposite way to everyone else.’
Stream is playing at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), The Mall, London, 1 October at 7pm, 2-3 October at 8pm. Tickets: £12; £11 ICA members. For bookings, call 020 7930 3647.
