public speaking, speaking publicly

Relay

Over the last 12 months, Boni Cairncross and I have been developing a work called Relay. It's about a bit of all these things: oration -  the act of speaking publicly and the nature of written political speech, manifesto or manifestation, listening publicly, unison or unity, the nature of political performance and nonsense or garble*.

Boni has documented the process a whole lot better than I have, but I wanted to write a bit about it, especially as this weekend, we'll be doing the 5th cycle in our second iteration of the work to date.

The work is a relay of politicised speech, working from a script and speaking simultaneously for 30 minutes, then listening simultaneously for 30 minutes, twice over. The whole performance goes for 2 hours.

The second (and current) iteration has had four previous cycles - face to face, between levels, across a major road, across the country (between Sydney and Perth) using the network and in each of the first three cycles, we listened to recordings of each others speeches. The fourth hit some technical glitches.


The Script

The script is a glitched/cut-up/remixed mash-up of political and spoken-work speeches from the likes of Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard, Paul Keating, Fidel Castro, Winston Churchill, Queen Elizabeth I, Aung San Suu Kyi and Maggie Thatcher.

And combined with words on silence, performance and power by Scherezade, Audre Lorde, Marina Abramovic, Hilary Clinton, John Cage, Steve Jobs, Ophelia and Urashi Vaid, with the highly-charged lyrics from Strange Fruit and Sie Gedanken Sind Frei.


It's a mixed set of words that forces us to appropriate political emphasis out of context.
We're wondering what the essence is of political speech - is there one?
We've discovered points in the performance that we replicate the original rhythm and pitch, especially from the Gillard smack-down:
'I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man, I will not. And this government will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man, not now, now ever.


It's not a perfect score and recently we've been wondering if, in the act of remixing the powerful words we're using, we're not actually disempowering them.

It's good for us to ask ourselves that.


It's also a work in which we, as two young white women, begin to think about the act of women speaking out, using our voices (if not our own words), to take time to speak through the duration, to 'raise' issues. And to listen to ourselves and each other in political speech and manifesto. Through it we acknowledge both our immense privilege and our depressing lack of power.


It is an ongoing work for us and we're learning about the balance between speaking for ourselves, with others, against others and instead of them. Perhaps this is the nature of parrhesia.


We're making this work within a time in which Wendy Davis and Letitia Van De Putte used their bodies and words to speak out on behalf of others, where Femen used their bodies and word to speak out on behalf of others* and when PM Julia Gillard spoke out on behalf of others.


The Fifth Cycle

The cycle of this current version is appearing as part of exist-ence 5 performance festival at Pact Theatre, Sydney on Saturday. We are back between London and Sydney, but without the network - raw.

We'll be yelling our script at each other - Boni in Sydney, me in London and relying on others to document/hashtag the work so that the documentation is as ephemeral and conceptual as the work itself.


You can follow #LaurenShoutingAtSydney or #BoniShoutingAtLondon on instagram and twitter and if you're in East London or Erskineville in Sydney, come past and listen (and feel free to post stuff).



UPDATE: Details for those in London - I'll be outside performance space between 10:30 and 12:30 BST on Saturday 20th July.


*which I personally found abhorently disrespectful and not political, nor the kind of feminism i wish to subscribe to AT ALL.