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Performance writing

Since 2004, scripts have been created in a range of modes for performance and as part of installations featuring voice recordings. Some are read aloud and recorded in a sound studio and played back in an installtion, others are performed live by volunteers or actors, or the artist. In general, there is an impetus for an exchange (dialogue or discussion) between the reader and whoever is present. Sometimes this is me in the recording studio, as in the First Love videos. In other cases, the dialogue is created between the performers. The idea for this approach was born of a desire to continue to challenge the barriers of representational forms in in storytelling and its performance, in which I have increasingly placed myself at the centre of the live work. (Underscored links to samples of writing below).



Above: First Love, 2009
Evelyn Krape reads the short story, Contract with witches

Retelling, untelling: Two Rivers (extract)
670-page publication produced for performance readings
determined by a play of chance, Lily read extracts from a book about a woman travelling in Colombia and Australia
I could breathe water, Sarah Scout, Melbourne, 2012



The Woman in the Bridge
live performance at ArtBAR
Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2012
curated by Justene William, also performed at Appin labyrynth



Benevolent Asylum: an eclipse of historical fiction
Live performance of 'Take me in' over two nights
with Siobhan Dow-Hall and Allan Girod
performed in the installation space of the exhibition
Fremantle Arts Centre, Fremantle, Western Australia, 2011
The script is partly reproduced in the exhibition program



Deadman Monologue
Script performed by Greg Ulfan and played as part of audio installation
Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Canberra, 2009



First Love
A series of 13 short stories, each read live and recorded as a performance in a sound studio.
Lily was present in each case, engaging the reader in conversation from outside the booth
Video was taken through the glass and sound inside, which severed the conversation and meaning from the dialogue. The reader becomes a subject of the transformation they experience in reading the story. These form a suite of videos exhibited at GRANTPIRRIE, and in 'Border Crossings' at Conical Inc. and 'Seeing to a Distance'.



Some kind of intermission: live in store, 2010
performance text in collaboration with Robert Cook
read aloud in a record store in Perth by performersRobert Cook, Ingle Knight and David Fussell
commissioned by Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts and P4 (pilot), Perth
For more information about this project, please visit the P4(pilot) official website

Scripted by ^pine^needle^cone^needle^frost^lily^hibberd^&^robert^cook^,
some kind of intermission – live in-store! will be a three person, modulating monologue (triologue) presented as a theatrical record-store performance. The overall monologue will be comprised of a series of nine shorter monologues, with staged/recorded clapping between each unit. The units will each be timed at about three minutes, the perfect pop song period. The performance will be a six song set, plus two encores (2 songs, then 1 song). The monologues will explore, elucidate and complicate the cultural and aesthetic synergy between 'the monologue' and minimalism. This will be given precise cultural form via an oblique/generative consideration of the conceptualization of The Wooster Group's Spalding Gray's shift into the monologue as a type of theatrical minimalism. In this, the project will pursue a poetic analysis of associations around the American oral story-telling tradition as a kind of Thoreauvian exercise in theatrical (and human) self-sufficiency. It will use the form of the monologue itself to explore, through content and form, the coming together and the pulling apart of story and object, of speaker and audience, of the theatrical present and the fictive tides of past and future tenses…and selves. As such, it will look at the function of 'spoken word' as an 'object event' as much as a signifier within an inherently (wound and unwound) associative network. The content of the work will riff off a blend of concrete observation, intuited historical exegesis, misunderstood cultural theory, self- and faux-self-revelation, and pop song tropes as they emerge from pop minimalism (of the punk and post punk varieties).

Bordertown
large-scale exhibition book with fictocritical essays,
performance scripts and 100 documentary photographs
Artspace, Sydney 2008



Endless summer: sunglasses and the spectacle of vision
Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide 2008,
and Gertrude Contemporary Art Space, 2007



The Perfect Future Game
dialogical performance with live poker game
ARC Biennale QUT Museum, 2007,
and Gertrude Contemporary Art Space, 2006