“We enact our roles in the company of others, who are in turn enacting their roles in interaction with us” (Erving Goffman).

 

What parts do people play in encounters?

How aware of themselves are they when they are playing these parts?

What remains hidden?

 

Taking language, performance and video, I create live situations that prompt participants to experience their identities and social rhythms through others.

 

Using the methodology and structures of theatre, body awareness techniques and behavioural theory, I look to define the parameters of social situations. In doing so I create the possibility for encounters that through their heightening, condensing or deconstruction, draw attention to the actions and emotions of each participant. My aim is to provoke an engagement with performed roles in order to reveal what lies beneath, creating a double exposure of self.

 

The work plays with live absence and mediated presence to allow space for each participant and their own subjective narrative to shape the formative process and therefore create a deeper understanding and awareness of the values attached to an exchange.

 

Each encounter looks to the individual and what it means to be oneself in relation to being with others. The complexities of empathy and co-operation come to the fore as I identify what it is people ignore and repress for a semblance of wholesale togetherness. Each work acts as a model for questioning these levels at which people interact, scrutinising the overall value of participatory art.