U N D E R C U R R E N T
PNUEMATIC | PERFORMANCE | LIVE INSTALLATION

Live Performance | Expositions
Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts | Taipei, Taiwan | 2007
BOOM! Australian-Taiwan New Media | TNUA | Taipei, Taiwan | 2007
SHOWROOM II | The Bonnington Gallery | Nottingham | UK | 2004
EMERGENCY | The Greenroom Theatre | Manchester | UK | 2004
KICKARTS | Busselton Jetty & Underwater Observatory | WA | 2003
OCH15 | Fremantle Arts Festival | Moores Building | Fremantle | AU | 2003
POAA | Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts | Perth | AU | 2003
National Review of Live Art | Midland | AU | 2002

Media Installations | Expositions
WALKING WITH WATER | Western Australian Maritime Museum | 2005

The Idea
What does it mean to perform under pressure and with self-containment? The body is suction-sealed inside a 45cm transparent dome containing 16minutes of air. The body ‘members states and conditions from subspace towards an aqueous alterity manifested through a movement trajectory. The performance concludes when either a) the air depletes, b) poisoning occurs, c) 25 minutes passes. Emergency oxygen and a first aid attendant should be present. Post-dive recuperation and body monitoring is employed.

This performance series has been developed with the support of a PICA R&D Grant 2003.



Sarah Jane Pell, Under Current III, Busselton Jetty & Underwater Observatory, Great Southern Region Western Australia 2003. Photograph Lorraine Corker.


Discussion
Gaston Bachelard, ‘The Poetics of Space’ (1964/1969) writes of Samuel Beckett on The Lost Ones’ who inhabit an igloo-uterine space designed to accommodate a single body. He quotes Beckett describing an “abode where lost bodies roam each searching for its lost one….little people of searcher’s who inhabit a closed cylinder, and spend their lives searching, for who knows what…”

This performance series explores the possibility of using a land-based housing to act as a mini biosphere shelter. It asks what it means to perform under pressure and with self-containment. Can the encapsulated breath and body walk with water before an audience and without walking and without water? How do the states and conditions of Aquabatics reference wider human states and conditions? How does the action of performing Under Current on land prescribe the states and condition of Aquabatics or my own state and condition? Has the repeated ceremony of Under Current been a public rite of exploration of my context and audience and m/ other /me? Was it a discussion about the line of differentiation between bare life and saturation; presence and absence; state and exception; confinement and escape; semiotic and symbolic and the subject and object? Is ‘the dome’ a place of abode? Is it a sanctuary to call home? Is Under Current the activism of a lost body roaming in search of something lost…?

Click picture for close up view

034-4 | UNDER CURRENT III | 2003 Busselton Jetty & Underwater Observatory | 2003 Performed & Devised by Sarah Jane Pell | Photographer Lorraine Corker | Assistant Rose Williams | Kickarts Court House Arts Centre, Residency | Busselton | Western Australia | 2003.

034-5 | UNDER CURRENT III | 2003 Busselton Jetty & Underwater Observatory | 2003 Performed & Devised by Sarah Jane Pell | Photographer Lorraine Corker | Assistant Rose Williams | Kickarts Court House Arts Centre, Residency | Busselton | Western Australia | 2003.

034-6 | UNDER CURRENT III | 2003 Busselton Jetty & Underwater Observatory | 2003 Performed & Devised by Sarah Jane Pell | Photographer Lorraine Corker | Assistant Rose Williams | Kickarts Court House Arts Centre, Residency | Busselton | Western Australia | 2003.

034-7 | UNDER CURRENT III | 2003 Busselton Jetty & Underwater Observatory | 2003 Performed & Devised by Sarah Jane Pell | Photographer Lorraine Corker | Assistant Rose Williams | Kickarts Court House Arts Centre, Residency | Busselton | Western Australia | 2003.

LIFELINES | DUTY OF CARE | DIVING
On one level, the ‘dome’ replicates the cavernous air pocket of a diving helmet. It has been designed to act as a trigger so that my body ‘members the ocean whilst I am inside the device. For example, the dome behaves like a conch shell. My contained breath is amplified and it surrounds my ears in simultaneous time like being underwater. (I employ a wireless mic to transmit my amplified breathing to where possible.) Like a diving helmet, the dome also fills with condensation leaving a hot and moist residue on my skin and the skin of the dome. It impedes visibility of the outside world and for the outside world it impedes visibility inwards.

As I would employ a life-line or the umbilical to the surface in diving, I do in this performance. Live camera operators and on-site medical support staff were my life lines to the surface and not passive attendants. I employed two artists to work with me on Under Current: Lorraine Corker (Australia) and Michael Mayhew (UK). Curiously, they were both born in Manchester: both have children and a sister living in Australia; both are performers exploring layers of human nature through pieces of themselves[2]; and both are natural lenses onto the world. Evidently my relationship with them was critical to my understanding of my relationship in the performance. I had to know that we could ‘speak’ as subject-to-subject in the undertaking of the performance whether this was visible or invisible; spoken or not. I asked them to be prepared to follow me through the process of the work and find the beauty in my body modification process no matter how contorted or distressed it appeared. I (unconsciously) asked them to be guardian realising the success of the work came down to my relationship with these artists and the role of mediator/ translator feeding me and the audience.

As a strategy to evoke mama[3], Corker (Training, Under Current I, III) painted an eye on the palm of her hand which held the camera. Corker’s vision-capture has become much of the aesthetic of my performance history. It is what you see if you were not there, and it is also what you could never see from any distance as an audience. Corker is literally responsible for giving others a unique and privileged insight into my process and I am very humbled by the maturity and sensitivity she brings to this. Mayhew’s strategy was very different (Under Current IV, V). He used the camera to dance with me, my shadows and the image on the screen behind. On both occasions he turned the camera off half way through the performance, when he felt abandoned, ridiculous or ignored in the process. For him, there was no point in following me further if he felt invisible. I continued on regardless. Inadvertently, when Mayhew cut off the beam to the live video projections that were closely monitoring my body, he diminished my visibility also leaving or positioning me at an even greater distance from the (male) audience. For Mayhew the connection was too dangerous and he contested/ protested silently and stood by, waiting for me to emerge. By severing the live feed, Mayhew unintentionally supported my passage further towards an indescribable semiotic space and overwhelming escape.

For Under Current V I experimented with a live post-performance care operation. Firstly, I did not remove myself from the audiences’ line of sight. I was a performer in a state of ‘intensive care’. (Mike Parr). I required assistance to stand out of the dome and walk to a stool. I sat perched like a storyteller. The audience could mill around and, if they must, touch me in front of everyone else. The truth was people were close enough to catch me if I fainted. I sat there for nearly an hour and relayed my experience, talking about the frightening and exquisite natures of the work from the inside, the body modification process and the biological considerations for post-performance duty-of-care. I was very tired. Mostly the audience spoke and mirrored my journey. I listened and tried to understand. I tried to understand the experience for the audience and the socially coded nature of my role. The audience became my mirror in a way and guided me through the intensive care. The work concluded when everyone was ready to leave – except me. For some reason, I felt gutted. I still do and I have never gone back to the gallery. Not even to collect my dome.



Sarah Jane Pell, Under Current V, The Bonnington Gallery, Nottingham UK 2004. Photograph Richard Graham.


RECEPTACLE | VESSEL | BODY
The kinds of choreographies that were born of the Under Current series are very childlike, very primitive and uncensored. Irigaray, in her understanding of patriarchal knowledges, would view the hard Perspex architecture as the solid representation of (male) confinement. Simultaneously, the coding or inscription of the adult female body within a constructed ‘belly’ inscribes the sculptural vessels as a representation of (m/other) confinement. Personally speaking, the spectrum of the performance, facilitates a belief that I renegade or transgress the imposition of the symbolic and the limits of laws imposed by the confining man/m/other. I question my role inside the shell or dome. Was I ‘diver’ or ‘pilot’ and all of the simultaneous binary categories of inside outside? Do I, ‘member an aqueous performance or do I drive a pre-designed machine towards a location? How did the choreography develop over the course of the Under Current series? How much became learnt, practiced, rehearsed and set to a saturated, memorised routine? How much was a strategy or symptom of/in/for mere ‘performance’? Furthermore, in this instance, could Under Current be an articulated dance of Kristeva’s chora?

'The chora is a kind of place, or receptacle. It is not easy to make this element intelligible because it is not, strictly speaking, representable. What may be represented, conceptualized, thought of, imagined, made clear and explicit, and is above all a product of regimentation and order, is part of the symbolic order or simply, the symbolic: the ego and its narcissism are part of the symbolic. To speak about the chora at all is paradoxical, given that to do so is to give it a place in the semiotic. The chora is a mobile and 'extremely provisional articulation constituted by movements and their ephemeral stases' (Kristeva 1984,p.25) The chora is a semiotic, non geometrical space where drive activity is 'primarily' located.' [Lechte 1990:128]

Excerpts of this discussion are detailed in the Exegesis of performance works by Pell published as 'Aquabatics as new works of Live Art' PhD, 2005 Edith Cowan University. All rights reserved.

NOTES:

[1] Discussion Sat 22 Oct 2005, dance-tech e list
[2] Reference to the many incarnations of the performance 333 - Pieces of Me, 2003 Michael Mayhew
[3] ‘Mama’ is a concept of the female gaze and speaking subject proposed by Lorraine Corker. Her thesis extends from the philosophies of fluxus and Yoko Ono towards her own publication of a ‘Mamafesto’, Honours in Fine Art, Edith Cowan University, 2005
[4] Gaston Banchelard, quotes Charbonneaux-Lassay in Le bestiaire du Christ, p 922: “Taken as a whole, with both its hard covering and its sentient organism, the shell, for the Ancients, was a symbol of the human being in its entirety, body and soul. In fact, the ancient symbolics used the shell as a symbol for the human body, which encases the soul in an outside envelope, while the soul quickens the entire being, represented by the organism of the mollusk. Thus, they said, the body becomes lifeless when the soul has left it, in the same way that a shell becomes incapable of moving when it is separated from the part that gives it life”. [Bachelard 1958/1994: 116]

REFERENCES:

Abramovic, M., (2003) The House with the Ocean View, Milano Italy: Edizioni Charter
Bachelard, G., (1958) The Poetics of Space, Revision 1994 with foreword by John R. Stilgoe, USA: Beacon Press
Featherstone, M., (2000) Ed. Body Modification, London: Sage Publications
Goldberg, R., (1998) Performance: Live art since the 60s, Revision 2004, London: Thames & Hudson
Grosz, E.A, (1989) Sexual SubΛersions: three French feminists, Sydney: Allen & Unwin
Kunst, B., (2002) Strategies of Subjectivity in Contemporary Performance Art, Maska, Performance Territories, 2002, Year. XVII, No. 74-75, p. 10-14, 77-80.
Lechte, J., (1990) Julia Kristeva, London & New York: Routledge



Sarah Jane Pell, Training, Platform Performance, The National Review of Live Art, Midland Western Australia 2002. Photograph Lorraine Corker.


MEDIA

PRINTED PRESS

Marshall, J., (2005) The Art of Life Support, Real Time & On Screen Vol 68, Aug/ Sep 2005, pp. 48
English, A. (2005) Artnotes WA: Sarah Jane Pell, Art Monthly Australia, No. 180 June 2005 p 51
Hoggarth, J., (2004) Underwater Love, Perth Woman’s Magazine, Autumn 2004, pp 128- 129
Mateer, J., (2004) Arts Alive in the West: The National Review of Live Art, Midland, Perth, Art Monthly Australia, No. 166 December 2003 – February 2004, p.42
Jansen, A., (2003) New Wave Artist, The West Magazine, Nov 28, p.27-28, pp. 2, 27, 28
King, T., (2003) OCH 15, From Country, AFWA Newsletter, Summer 2003, Vol 12, Ed. 4, pp 6
McGrath, J. (2003) OCH #15, Exhibition Review, Art Seen in WA, Nov
Keegan, T., (2003) Art under the water pushes boundaries, Busselton-Margaret Times, Oct 16, pp 10
Keegan, T., (2003) Our own little Mermaid, Busselton Herald, Oct 16, p.1, pp.1

TELEVISION

Henschke, I., (2003) Underwater Opera, NEXUS, ABC ASIAPACIFIC TV (Aired to 20 Countries incl. Japan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Suva) June 20
O’Donnell, M., (2003) Underwater Opera Sarah Jane Pell, ABC TV 730 Report (Stateline), Apr 11
Andersson D., (2003) ‘Umbra’: Sarah Jane Pell, SCAM TV (Ch 31) June 9


WEB LINKS

coming soon

Click picture for close up view

034-1 | TRAINING | 2002 National Rewiew of Live Art | Midland | 2002 Performed & Devised by Sarah Jane Pell | Photographer Lorraine Corker | NRLA Platform | Midland Railway Workshops | City of Swan.

034-2| TRAINING | 2002 National Rewiew of Live Art | Midland | 2002 Performed & Devised by Sarah Jane Pell | Photographer Lorraine Corker | NRAL Platform | Midland Railway Workshops | City of Swan.

034-3 | TRAINING | 2002 National Rewiew of Live Art | Midland | 2002 Performed & Devised by Sarah Jane Pell | Photographer Lorraine Corker | NRLA Platform | Midland Railway Workshops | City of Swan.