Raymond Pettibon

https://drawingandperformance.wordpress.com/2020/11/02/internacional-conference-programme/#more-1226

This research project, housed at INET-md‘s Dance Studies Group, intents to look at the way drawing is used during the creative process of scenography within the performance arts, and generate a public digital database which can be used as a source for discussion and reflection by practitioners and academics alike.

It is our intention to structure and reflect upon the artistic and pragmatic relationship scenographers have with drawing as a device for the creation of space and time of performance and as mediator between the bodies of actors or dancers on stage and the drawer’s page. The study of these relationships informs the creative process of scenography and poses the hypothesis of an particular relationship between the gestuality of the drawer-scenographer and that of the performer generating space. It is our view that understanding the way this dialogue happens will further develop contemporary definitions of scenography.

With this in mind we will post our findings in the form of short papers or articles, as well as interviews with scenographers, their digitised drawings and notebooks and photographs of their performances.

In parallel, this material will be added to the existing database at INET-md’s Dance Studies Group, TerPsiCore.

Any questions should be directed at the project’s manager, Filipa Malva.

This project is funded through a postdoctoral fellowship from FCT – Foundation for Science and Technology.

The fundamental notions that we take for granted in drawing practice have been challenged and the acts of drawing may be extended through the interaction with media, new technologies and materials. At the same time the formative relationship between drawing and performance becomes critical in understanding the intermedial nature of the so-called performative artwork and its visual aspects (and scenography), as well as the ways media types are created and re-modelled in changing historical, cultural, social, aesthetic, and communicative contexts. Regardless of the fact, that they can possibly be perceived as pieces complete in themselves, certain drawings, but most importantly underdrawings, are often seen as work-in-progress products in connection to painting, while rehearsals are seen as work in progress, and as self-critical practices and methodologies, in relation to performance. This paper examines the ways that the theatricality of the preliminary drawings can be considered as a form of stage rehearsal by focusing on rehearsal as a temporal and theoretical topic and on Raymond Pettibon’s idiosyncratic performances and home videos from the 80s that draw exclusively from the theatricality of the rehearsal process. Rehearsals encourage the imperative to collaborate and Pettibon’s scripts are performed prima volta (first- timeness) - performed the first time but omitted at the repetition (rehearsal). They are performed during the rehearsal, but there is no repetition of this moment, and it is this “first-timeness” that is captured by the artist in his films. The artist renders the rehearsing process visible in his films to present an open-ended learning process in front of the recording camera. The nexus of the performative and fine arts is manifested in the visual artist’s documentation of improvised acting as it is in his vivacious drawings. Pettibon’s scripts oscillate between performance and rehearsal while they are not composed for but in performance.