The first phase of The Documenter is now finished. She thanks all those who were involved and hopes that you find the work here useful.

Do have a look around the site and also check out the links down on the right hand side which might be of use.

The Documenter (whoever she is?)
November 2009

The Documenter is in the room, she is present as the groups are working on their pieces but she is not directly part of any of them. She wonders what it means that she is in this role of observer? She finds herself sitting behind a desk – hiding behind her computer for a moment, when really what she wants to do is to make herself visible – to become integrated/integral to the making through her processes of documentation.

As a way of coping with the situation she finds herself in she attempts to work with it. But how? She recognises her point of view, that she has a particular point of view and she works from there. It’s what she sees, what she hears, what she thinks that will invariably become the document. She knows the pitfalls of attempting to work from objectivity and instead she wants the document to become something (an artwork?) in its own right – a spring-board, a space to work from, a space to work with.

1. Here are some documents/artefacts that formed part of the performances during Ross Brown’s workshop.

THEN

2. Ross then used them as part of his presentation “16 Essays”

THEN

3. ???

1. Walk around the room

2. Stop together

3. One person start walking

4. The rest of the group start walking

Click here to go to the feed:

http://tinyurl.com/yjb9nxp

How do you work in these circumstances? What ways do you discover to work together? What strategies do you employ to make your voice heard? How do you listen to the rest of the group? How do you listen to the work?  How do you make a collaboration?

“We pay as much attention to the process of making our work as the work itself.” Goat Island Performance Group – Small Acts of Repair (Routledge, 2007)

Below are a series of images which were taken as a spontaneous response to the processes of collaboration during a workshop with sound designer Ross Brown. These images began with the Documenter taking a photograph (from the edges, from a distance) of one member of the group who was (probably unwittingly) performing a gesture that the Documenter felt reflected or showed a particular point in the collaboration process. The Documenter has become interested in how these gestures (both in proximity of the face) performed something of the difficulty of collaboration.

From these initial photographs she approached the group and asked the other members of it to perform the same gesture but this time for a portrait. Through this process the Documenter wonders how the dissemination of the gesture might affect the group? How, by giving other members of a group the opportunity to ‘step into the shoes’ of one of their collaborators, the collaboration might shift, and the potential ‘fraughtness’, which the Documenter witnessed, might be made more fluid? Here are the two initial photographs of the gestures:

1. Hand on chin

2. Hands clasped on head

Below is the gallery of portraits, where other members of the group (including the original person) re-present themselves and the gesture:

Keywords from Ross Brown's workshop "How do audiences hear in the theatre?"

The Documenter might begin her process by recording her entrance into the building where the workshop and the documenting will be taking place. She thinks of this as a way in.

You can find more recordings here.