a solo of Katie Duck with Jožica Avbelj
»The entry of performance into art is not indicative of artists turning towards theater forms or conventions but rather of a resistance to the containment and fixities in ‘conventional’ art and theater.«
Gallery
About the show
The performance contains images that provide a theatrical theme by way of a black dress, a chair, three wigs, texts, movement and sound. Her text is non narrative based on four titles; TheInstitutionalization of Everything, Love, The Anatomy of the Vagina, Death.
The text is placed in and around her use of body, space, sound and objects that she discovers in each location. She has designed a film that plays behind the performance and re makes a sound track for each event according to the space and/or what the guest artists adds to the CAGE material.
Her idea is to use CAGE as a score she can share with a female artists offering a platform for that artists to voice their cultural and personal expression. Her ambition is to play CAGE in as many cultures as possible so that the material she has written in the score CAGE can continually develop and be played in real time for live time audiences.
The title Cage refers to the composer John Cage whose scores, among other things, introduced musicians to choice in the 1950's. This piece uses choice in how the performers form a relationship to the public, in how the guest artist is integrated into the score and how a % of the piece is therefore improvised.
The title CAGE also refers to how the institutionalization of absolutely everything, the loss of love, the need to face the anatomic technology perfection of what the Vagina actually is and the use of death as tactic for fear has suppressed our emotions and feelings forcing us all to live in a CAGE.
We view distressing events daily and are able to tuck this in a pocket of our consciousness until eventually panic attach grips our spirits and anything social seems beyond reason. The human condition to feel what we see and hear is numbed, boxed away in the normal. The new normal is violence. The new normal leaves little space for anyone to feel the violence.
Language, politics, money freezes society in a delusional state of mind. The continual alienation of woman as an integrate role in our societies (and I do not mean joining the boys club or playing along with the rituals of male bonding) suppresses men and woman alike. CAGE is played by one nomadic woman and one woman from the culture it is played. It is not played by women as an exclusion to men. It is played by women because we are women. CAGE offers no solutions by way of sports metaphors, winners or looser. Cage is about - total take over.
CAGE was written in 2014. It just so happens we are now entering a disclosure of the Hollywood male power mongrels. I suppose then CAGE is a moment of “Me to” in retrospect to when it was created.
Credits
Devised by Katie Duck
Performed by Katie Duck and Jožica Avbelj
Film and sound track Katie Duck
About Katie Duck
Katie Duck is a director/performer/teacher who has been working professionally since 1976. She has dedicated her life to her work as an on going process rather than settle into one specific methodology or frame. She is working in the context of the time she is living in day to day. Her work is the voice for how she feels about that. Katie Duck is a feminist with an edge to move things along rather than look behind.
By the 1980's, Katie began to take a microscopic study for the role improvisation plays in her real time composition integrating music, movement, object and writing. Improvisation in a Katie Duck performance is not the antithesis of choreography or composition; it is how she makes her art work out of practice both in the studio setting and the newness of real time improvised performance. Her performances are about the experience of being there, you are participating in the event and thus, in a sense, the work”. Katie Duck’s practice is a reflection of what she believes art in the theatre can only be; live.
She has developed a manifesto in how she conducts research, rehearsal processes, and workshops towards performances based on her background working with live musicians beginning in the mid 70's and her obsession to write and then voice text in a mix with her musical background. Over the past 15 years, she has integrated her curiosity for developmental brain studies as a part of how she teaches movement research and how she works with live public. Public, in her performances, are witnesses and the main provider for how the piece is perceived.
Her performances are a practice of presence in a sound driven space with a flirtation to engage public so hopefully they remember what they have seen, heard and felt long after the live performance has died.