SHOWING WITHOUT GOING

Connections

Copy K1tt3ns

'Copy K1tt3ns' is a sharing and project development platform that enables artists to share their unfinished scripts with audiences and ask them to perform these scripts as part of their development and reflection phase. It is open-ended in the sense that audiences decide how they want to respond/direct the script, and can tackle either single characters, develop settings and scenographies, etc. Additionally, the artists can choose to use or discard these audience proposals. All parties are invited to challenge intellectual property, and the artists need to reflect on their loyalties to the initial ideas. This could happen over recordings, live video/audio calls or edits of the transcript.. either as static documents or over collaborative processors such as Google Docs.
Approaches

Re-staging

A work can be learned and rehearsed by a new artistic team in the place where it is to be re-staged, making it possible for it to tour when the creator cannot travel. A process of distant collaboration between a creator and a performer / team may be necessary - this can be done online, or without direct telecommunication but rather using scripts, scores and instructions.

#process

Approaches

Instructions to Imagine

There are examples of artworks involving instructions which are perhaps only meant to be read or heard, the result of acting upon them left to your own imagination. Perhaps useful to remember: being given an instruction, being told to do something - this of course is real, and it has an effect, regardless of whether or not you carry it out. 

#participation

 

Approaches

Existing things > SWG

It’s possible to take or think of a conventional approach, format, tool or live performance element and 'convert' them for showing without going, if only in one’s mind, to see what that would give. For example ‘workshop’, ‘boxing ring’, ‘festival programme’, ‘orchestra’… 

#tools

#process

Approaches

Hybrid - going / not going

Combining different approaches of going and not going. For example, an artist travelling to do research or work in a residency to set up the conditions for an artwork to happen later in their absence.

#process

Approaches

Script

Conventionally, a script is written by one or more authors before the performance but it is also possible to be co-written by authors or artists in different places before the performance, or generated collectively during the performance.

It contains text or descriptions of actions to be performed but also for specifics of location or set, props, sound, light, movement, costume, etc. 

#tools

Questions

Authorship

What happens to the authorship (and potentially copyright) when the line between artists, local collaborators, participants and other contributors gets blurred in a Showing without Going situation? (i.e. when in need of heavy local creative input, or co-creation)

Questions

Responsibility of the Audience

At what point does an audience become responsible for the work; how it unfolds or turns out? 

Is there a risk they do not realise this point arrives? Where might confusion arise? 

What conventions pre-suppose a lack of responsibility from a paying public? 

In what ways can you be responsible for something you 'witness'?