Bertrand Lesca and Nasi Voutsas (Bert & Nasi) are some performance makers whose work I have admired for some time. Their website and ‘Online Content’ is a key reference point for me in terms of how I want to document elements of my own practice as it develops.
Bert and Nasi make short, lo-fi videos using webcams or phone cameras, and use these as both process documentation and promotional material. These videos feature just the two performers in their typical self-reflexive performance, and they illustrate the tense antagonism, absurdism and themes of violence and breakdown of relationships that appear in the duos shows, and they have an immediate, off-the-cuff, ‘in rehearsal’ quality to them. The video ticket sales is a good example of this. It features Voutsas defending himself as Lesca berates him offscreen for not pulling his weight in the marketing of Palmyra’s upcoming run. I like the palpable tension that comes through in this clip, and how vividly it recreates the violent bullying that the show explore in a much smaller format.
This homemade aesthetic, improvised nature, and congruency with/separation from the content of the actual performance are elements I incorporated into my own ‘in-rehearsal’ documentation of experimenting with ‘the voice’ and opening text of my in-development piece. Full documentation of this process is given here, but to compare the video in itself to ticket sales, one can see the similarities and differences in the content, as well as differences of outcomes.
My video reveals some themes that will appear in the final piece; namely the difficulty, frustration and vulnerability of creating performance about such challenging ideas, as well as the disparity between this challenge and playful, uninhibited dancing (as also appears in Bert and Nasi’s online content). This congruence between the themes captured in the creative documentation and the themes explored in the final piece is something i feel I’ve successfully borrowed from Bert and Nasi’s ticket sales.
Additionally, my video offers an insight into my rehearsal process, through documenting my improvisation. There is a focus in my video on revealing how I developed more meaningful voice and text through the improvisation – a similar focus is not as present in ticket sales, because of its primary use as promotional material. However, both videos are clearly and intentionally constructed improvised and ‘in rehearsal’, and they both blur the line between actual documentation of process and standalone material – this playful and disorientating layering of realities is something I really enjoy.
I do recognise however, that ticket sales has been more carefully constructed as an engaging piece of promotional material, using its links to the main show and self-contained entertainment value to appeal to viewers. The repeated, slow, absurd comedy of awkwardness and failure in my video goes some way towards this, but is not as tight a document as ticket sales. While still keeping a ‘live’ quality, I could remake this footage to create a tighter and more engaging piece of film.
Bert and Nasi’s approach to creating artefacts that work as process documentation, self-contained works, and promotional material is really exciting for me, feeding into DIY approaches I’m exploring in my work. Documenting in this way evidences development while creating a larger body of interesting work than simply the final performance.
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Bibliography
Bert and Nasi (2019). online content. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfURSnlbQIg [Accessed 23 Mar. 2019].
Bert and Nasi (2018). ticket sales. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtEgwH_fk_k [Accessed 23 Mar. 2019].
Jordan Linton (2019). Improvised text. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=de2PwUwvOsc [Accessed 23 Mar. 2019].
Lesca, B. and Voutsas, N. (n.d.). bertandnasi. [online] Available at: https://bertandnasi.com/ [Accessed 23 Mar. 2019].
MACPP // Jordan Linton 