PERFORMANCE VIDEO Two performers reproduce the movements of Hassam Abdo, a young Palestinian boy stopped at an
Israeli army checkpoint in 2004 with a bomb attached to his body. In this performance a man enacts and repeats the gestures of
the boy as he follows orders to disarm himself and remove his clothing, while a second performer, a woman, embodies all
that intervenes from behind the camera; the soldiers, the viewer, the camera itself. This choreographic echo begins quietly with subtle
hand and body movements as the performer replays the gestures of trauma internally. Gradually these gestures become full movement with the cycle repeating
at greater and greater intensity. The second performer intervenes, at first to help initiate the cycle, later trying to stop it.
[performers: Robert Schweitzer, Monique Romeiko]
Presented at SAT (Société des arts technologiques), Montreal, 2004. A storefront converted into a theatre.
Seats inside the space face out onto the street. The audience, seated inside, watches action taking place outside. The window becomes a screen
when viewed from the inside. From outside the space appears as a theatre viewed from the stage. Performance takes place in the park opposite
the window. The performance has both explicit actions and 'ambient' ones, hardly distinguishable from every-day activities. Live sound (from
mics in the park) was mixed with prerecorded material in a live sound mix for each performance. While water pours down the window, separating
the audience from the world, Cinéma opens with a monologue about the nature of the first word and the dominance of the
'cinematic eye' in our experience of the world. The work plays with the idea of the screen and the window, simultaneously alienating and
revealing, the divider of public from private space, a threshold which we both guard and constantly cross, literally and in our imaginations.
PHOTO WORK This place is Kittuquattuk or Polar Bear Pass, a valley that traverses Bathurst Island in the high arctic. The valley goes from sea to sea, east to west across the island.A corridor for bears. In the short high arctic summer it is home to a wide variety of living things (migrating birds, musk oxen, caribou, fox, arctic hare) which thrive on the sedge meadows and other vegetation fed by spring melt water. I am walking alone across the valley. The land is flat, treeless. I can see an entire landscape; to the horizon at either end of the valley and to the slight hills rising on either side. In the distance I see a white dot moving in the landscape. After an hour this dot is now a shape, and closer. Moving. A wolf approaching. More than an hour passes. It is right here. Close now, close enough that a jump would bring us into contact. It circles me. The wolf is getting downwind and around again in a kind of sideways trot, nose, ears, eyes constantly focused on me in acute curiosity. I am aware of an intelligence not like my own. This animal is in complete control of this situation. I wonder what the wolf is thinking. I will remember this moment... always. The wolf, as if distracted, moves off... stopping to look back only once.
PHOTO WORK Photo performance/re-enactement of a news event. The source of this image is in fact two news photos. Both are of politicians campaigning in open-roofed vehicles – one in India and the other in Iran (source images below). The choreography of the security personnel was identical in both cases. This new photo combines these two sources, not through photoshop but rather by re-enacting these two news images as performance.
