Annette Arlander
theatre director, professor, performance and theory, Theatre Academy (FI)
Performing landscape - producing time
One way of performing a place is by repetition, going to a place over and over again. Returning to the same place once a week for a year with the same scarf and a video camera has been my way of trying to produce time - both in a private sense, finding a place worth returning to and the time to actually do it, and in a social sense, documenting a more or less public landscape and it's changes into a diary of the year. This type of work combines performance and documentation into a method of production with the purpose to support the creative process. It could also be used to explore ones relationship to the landscape, to take up issues within a community by focusing on special areas, to understand changes in the environment within a time period, etc. that is, to produce knowledge related to the three ecologies by Félix Guattari (2000) - roughly the subjectivity, the socius and the (global) environment. This mode of working raises questions about the relevance of a devotional practice for the performer, the political use of the self as a focusing tool when addressing environmental issues and the ethical challenge in creating action models to be repeated in every day life.
Annette Arlander is professor of performance and theory at the Theatre Academy, Finland. She is Doctor of Arts 1999, theatre director 1981. Most of her work today is concerned with performing landscape, documented by means of video or recorded voice and presented in a contemporary art context. (www.harakka.fi/arlander). Her research interests are related to practice as research, performance studies, site specificity, landscape, and the environment. They could be summarized into "Performing landscape - notes on site-specificity in the light of practical experiences with documentation and display".