The Rhizome Project

Project Leaders: Cradeaux Alexander

Number of participants: 15

Duration: 3 days

Description:

Gilles Deleuze’s rhizome can be interpreted as a concept which supports non-hierarchical structures and non-hierarchical attitudes. It resides along a horizontal plane and allows for production along its length, thereby circumventing masters and servants, leaders and followers, and top-down management structures. As a conceptual structure for performance-making, the rhizome is here unearthed as a tool for performance-makers and participants to utilise and occupy as a democratic space of manufacture where directors, authors and participants (3 elements often employed within performance-making) are re-programmed, stripped of previous associations and power play, and are re-arrayed along an equal pathway.

Up to 15 Participants will inhabit the conceptual space of Deleuze’s rhizome, and operate over the course of 3 days as performance-makers and participants. In this space we will endeavour to rethink juxtapositions such as director/author, producer/performer, and enter into a method of making which encourages improvisation, joint authorship and spontaneous creation.

Timetable:

Day 1 (Monday 31st October)

Morning Session: Participants will gather, there are introductions, and I will share a brief lecture on my own performance work with specific emphasis on rethinking relationships between audience and performer, alienation, and the third space created between maker and viewer.

Afternoon Session: Participants will share their own current practices and concerns in a PechaKucha, paving the way for partnerships, overlaps and associations amongst the group which will inform the rest of the workshop.

Day 2 (Wednesday 2nd November)

Morning Session: Small groups will form together under mutual agreement. These groups will begin to devise personal procedures and methods which will ultimately create a performance piece shown to the rest of the group at the end of the workshop.

Afternoon Session: I will initiate individual group tutorials and discussion on the working methods created thus far and help to clarify and define strategies and concepts. This may include defining themes and modes of performance (a movement work, a comedic demonstration, a tableau, a multi-media work, an action, etc.).

Day 3 (Friday 4th November)

Exhibition and Presentations to the group. Analysis and feedback about each group’s presentations are solicited from the whole group. Lively discussion, wine, coffee, communal dinner. A look back on what worked, what didn’t, and how this way of working might be developed for further investigation within individual practices.