This is...

This proposal is for a performance titled This is… by Sally Doughty and Pete Shenton. It responds explicitly to the conference’s questions of ‘What modes of attention foster the dance between memory and motion, archive and artform’?, and ‘What matters and for which bodies in the fabulations and materials of archives’? Memories, real and false, form the backbone of This is… through the interrelationship of memory, archives, movement and speech.

Setting our bodies in motion, a series of repetitive, slowly morphing gestures emerge that suggest memories and images, which we name and propose verbally to the audience. The movement repetition becomes almost mesmeric, allowing us to dig deep into our personal archives to capture and share memories from our individual lived experiences; from earlier iterations of this performance and from fabulous fabulations that are positioned concurrently with – at times – these seemingly unrelated gestures. Memory further serves as the performance’s methodology, which demands that we attend to and capture our improvised movement and speech, and commit (as much) of it to memory (as we can) in order to revisit and resolve it later in the performance.

Attending to memory, motion and speech in this way develops multiple layers of meaning for performers and audience to suggest that ‘…within this passage of relation lies the logic, narrative, pattern or subject that we, as human beings, are bound to look for’ (Burrows 2010: 111). We propose that we make sense of Burrows’ ‘relation’ by finding points of connection that map directly onto our own lived experience. This is… reflects different modes of attention and opens up spaces in which we can imagine a reality that may not exist, as exemplified in McGilchrist’s example of a bird attending to a seed whilst simultaneously being alert to possible wider dangers (2022).

This is… operates at the intersections between individual and collective memory to produce gentle, witty, moving, thought provoking and unexpected commentaries on one’s past and present self.