Away from Home: The Curious Domain of Passage

Whalley, Joanne and Miller, Lee (2007) Away from Home: The Curious Domain of Passage. Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, 12 (2). pp. 66-74. ISSN 1352-8165

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Abstract / Summary

This article is co-authored by Whalley and Miller, who have collaborated consistently on performances and published writings for several years. The text focuses on four contemporary practitioners, each of whose work derives from actions performed in multiple locations, and illustrates a dynamic set of relations between the multiple sites of ‘home’ and ‘away’. Interdisciplinary performance maker Fiona Templeton’s ‘YOU – The City’ (1988), collaborative artists Alison Hanney and Adam Dade’s ‘Stacked Hotel Room’ (1998-2002), and Graham Gussin’s conjoined pieces ‘Remote Viewer’ (2002) and ‘Doppelganger’ (2003), are considered in relation to the shifting geography of the journey, and its attendant conceptual framings. The authors’ choice to consider the importance of their understanding of ‘home’ in relation to the work of each of the practitioners discussed, forces a more playfully embodied response to the work – particularly as all of the pieces were engaged with through mediated frames, rather than through the ‘real’/embodied engagement of the haptic usually expected of audiences in site-specific practice.

This ludic, performative approach to the written style of the article foregrounds those shared concerns about the need for some form of (albeit temporary) fixity in a shifting geographical landscape. Each practitioner creates work that moves away from a particular fixed notion: ‘home’ is the explicit point of departure in the work of Dade and Hanney, the ‘self’ is the fixed point from which Gussin moves away in each of the pieces discussed, and Templeton’s work appears to propose a shift from a monocular response towards the multiplicity of readings available to the traveller exploring the city (New York). The article suggests that, although each piece is separated geographically and temporally, they all require some form of openness or ‘surrender’ to fixity in order that the viewer might embrace the more unsettled aspects of their construction.

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