clayfaces in a crowd
by Stuart Partridge

Over the Summer of 1997-98, myself and three friends came together at the Woodford Folk Festival in Queensland for a one-off, title-less, theme-less, time-unlimited, self-creating performance. We had one official conversation about what we wanted to do, which took place while we were applying our make-up and getting dressed, and then we did the performance. What came out of it was a raw and beautiful thing, flowing more smoothly and conveying so much more than any of us could of thought. And we'd almost tossed a coin about whether to even do it in the first place.

It wasn't what we'd all gone to Queensland or the Festival for. David and Paul were performing their Two Suits show, and Rebecca and I were there to plain enjoy ourselves. But this was an idea we'd played with and loosely talked about for some time, having stumbled upon it while walking home from dinner one night. We thought there might be some fun in exploring it in a crowded festival environment.

We dressed all in white, though we looked significantly different from eachother. We had clay on our faces but not mime-style: there were variations on the full-white so as not to make it seem we were trying to be actual statues. Rather, we wanted to make ourselves as different from the mass of people moving through the Festival, but not to give ourselves away too much or be identified with some other group or idea before we'd had the chance to explore what we were doing.

The idea was simple and clear, the rules broad though definite. We wanted to slowly roam through the festival crowd exploring ourselves and thinking about relating to the world as if none of our usual understanding of the objects around us made sense. It was as if everything was new, things not the way we'd normally expect them to be. We moved at our own pace, stopping to play at making shapes and interacting with fixed objects in the festival grounds, purely self-involved and self-discovering. But we did it with a dim awareness of eachother, as if we were connected by an invisible elastic thread; we could not speak, could not directly acknowledge eachother or the audience, but tacit meetings would occur where we could begin a process of exploration with eachother to define simple, non-verbal relationality.

Some fascinating and beautiful moments emerged. Relationships would emerge and evolve from simple encounters, ideas would develop based on touch or oriented to objects, then die away just as quickly as we moved on to the next thing . We found instances of directing one another, of ignoring one another, of standing right up against eachother whilst not seeing them. Sometimes there would be cooperation, sometimes not.

It felt like there was a simpatico with eachother: each of us would respond to suggestions and movements with an innate, primal honesty. We took the ideas being offered and went with them, or not, depending on how it felt for each of us at that moment. It was as if we were developing a new language, a body-derived communication specific to what we were exploring, rather than acting out a narrative. We weren't driven by a need to get anywhere - there was no time limit or destination in this roaming - more, it was an opportunity to explore eachother in an intimate and personal way, and, most interestingly, to do it in a public space.

Though purely secondary as a motivation for Rebecca, Paul, Dave and I, it is the notion of undertaking this exploration as a performance in a public space that made the exercise so interesting. Indeed, this is where 'exploration' and 'exercise' become redundant in the analytic sense since the notion of doing it in front of a large group of others necessarily brings a performance aspect into it. To call what we were doing purely a 'performance', though, is problematic and misleading. Performing was obviously not the point of the exercise for any of us. The movement we'd been doing with eachother at play was more about exploring relationships with eachother, at using this rarefied atmosphere with 'rules' governing our interaction to explore threads of relating and tease out movement ideas without wandering into the realm of the practiced or prepared. That is to say, we wanted to be 'normal' in that nothing we were doing was beyond the physical capabilities of ordinary folk. Theoretically, any one of the people watching us, had they watched us long enough to figure out the rules and were so inclined, could have joined us at any time and successfully started relating with us in this way.

To complicate the notion of personal-relations by moving through a public arena is an attractive one. To explore personal issues in a public space seems odd, and yet don't we do this all the time in the way we relate to other people in our everyday lives? Certainly we hold much back from the public arena, but there is much in the way we relate to eachother non-verbally - shaking hands, hugging, kissing, hand-holding, fist-fighting - all instances of strong interpersonal expression through non-verbal communication. We stand up against eachother in lifts and in checkout lines and look without seeing all the time.

These types of conscious and unconscious forms of relating take place publicly, and yet are so collectively felt as socially acceptable and appropriate that they are never questioned. It is interesting, then, to explore the ways we are capable of relating to one another in a public space using these forms of tacit communication. To elevate communication to the sphere of performance necessarily objectifies the notion of human relationships. This process, then, exemplifies something of the peculiarity and specialness of human relation. Certainly, this is what we felt as participants in this performance, in as much as we shared a communication in a public space that said much more to each of us than words could have, and we did it in front of people who for the most part had too much noise around them to hear what was going on between us.

This further notion, then, of exploring the communication that takes place beneath what is verbally spoken lays at the conceptual heart of this exercise. The fact that we were unable to adequately state what is was we hoped to do and achieve at the beginning of the performance says so much about the nature of relating to eachother without words. We could only establish our aim in doing the exercise, having been through the process of exploration and communicating such as it was. The fact that these complex non-verbal conversations were going on in a arena of such human noise and babble, in itself says much about the process of communication.

In this way, peoples' reactions to the performance helped unify us as a group. The negative reactions (mostly jibes from cheeky children and bored adults) prompted us to help one-another through, whereas the positive feedback just made us all feel good. The awe and shocked looks in the faces of some people were as gratifying as the complete disinterest displayed by others. Just to be there, raw and exposed, was a thrill of its own.