Statement of Puprose:
We’re interested in how meaning comes into being in relational circuits. How does a community constitute itself around objects, language or otherwise, and then how do those objects come to “mean” in, for, and through the community in which they circulate, which circulates around them? We propose to think about how a performance space can bring an ephemeral community, in all its circulating, relational activity, into being, and then observe how meaning might be produced in its circuits. We hope to use the delimited space/time of a performance to study this dynamic in detail. More specifically, we propose to have two performers more or less statically located, enacting work/forms designed to engage a freely circulating audience—what we’re calling “polar” pieces. The third performer moves in and out of the modes of relation natural to the space, while also physically circulating in the space—at times they act as audience, at times they join the two polar performances, at times they operate to facilitate the audience’s transmission of elements of one of the static performances to the other, and simultaneously to facilitate the audience’s movement in and out of varying modes of relation by means of these “transmission objects.”
