‘Say Ahhh’ is an up-close, 28-minute performance for video. Wooden depressor pushed to tongue, pin light searching the frame of the wide-open mouth, I allow the camera to expose the cavity of palate and throat and tonsils in a messy test of self-diagnosis, revealing the site of anxiety, the cause of this extended isolation.
Drawing on a long practice of durational performance, ‘Say Ahhh’ pushes up to the limits of the body—jaw tightening, breathing labored, throat filling and becoming quickly red and raw—as the visual becomes increasing abstracted, and the sound aligns with a chant or drone. I encourage all types of engagement: perhaps coming and going along the timeline, similar to how the public encounters the performances I usually make over 8 or 10 or 15 hours, or staying with it: a surrender to subtle shifts in a tight frame and a reassessment of proximity and sensuality, scale and scope.
In reconsidering the intersection between the live and the mediated, performance and its document, I use this work to till the lineage of Peggy Phelan’s purist ontology of performance toward Philip Auslander’s redefinition of liveness, and further reference Laura Mark’s collapsing of the visual and the haptic. As a visual performer, I have particular spatial, durational and embodied experience, but I have been video-resistant in my own practice, so in this suspended Covid time I began looking back in order to move forward, and this piece certainly pays tribute to both Annie Sprinkle’s 1990 live performance ‘Public Cervix Announcement’ as well as VALIE EXPORT’s 2007 video work in which her vocal cords were recorded with a medical camera, ‘the voice as performance, act and body.’
I am thankful for this opportunity with the Performance Research Network at Newcastle University to uncover new possibilities in my practice, and from within my lineage, as I explore what liveness means now.
Exhibition ‘LIVENESS’ now on view: https://speccollstories.ncl.ac.uk/liveness/index.html
