Human Difference

Five live artists over fourteen working days created a dense and fervid experience for audiences in the Galway Arts Centre during the Galway Arts Festival this year. Subject to Ongoing Changewas a marathon of durational performance totaling seventy-six hours and thirty minutes over two weeks by The Performance Collective, a Dublin based group of artists—Pauline Cummins, Michelle Browne, Alex Conway, Frances Mezzetti and Dominic Thorpe—who have been working together since 2007. The Collective performed together in various combinations day by day, creating an extraordinary live exhibition in the Arts Centre’s space which was part improvisational and durational performance, part sculptural installation of the cumulative and peculiar materials used as props and creative matter for the live action. Enriching the distinguished Galway Arts Centre’s program of visual art events for the annual Galway Arts Festival, the daily live performances provided an alternative to the popular festival’s more easily digestible menu of narrative, text or music based shows this year. The festival is renowned for large-scale spectacle performance along with experimental theatre, and The Performance Collective forged a new presentation of conceptual visual performance to add to its oeuvre.

Viewers hesitantly or boldly entered the first-floor rooms, unsure of the rituals of viewership in the context of this interdisciplinary genre of performance that sits somewhere untidily but vividly between visual art, experimental theatre, contemporary dance and participatory or socially engaged practice. For some attendees, the encounter with these performers and their multifarious materials in the gallery was exciting and stimulating. For others, it was a baffling experience that subverted the normal expectations and obligations between performer and audience to generate a space of unfamiliar and radical relationships.

Without pre-constructed dramatic content, narrative or characterization, the free-form improvisations of the performers were liberated from the conventions of theatre, and without traditional beauty or a necessary focus on the body, the performances were freed from the conventions of dance. If the viewer expected contemporary visual art conceptualizations, they were hard to find in the moment-to-moment actions and interactions the performers developed as the hours and days inexorably advanced. These artists seemed let loose from society, normality and practical function. They behaved and appeared like the inmates of a psychiatric hospital: exceptional human beings who are liberated from social norms and purpose, who live and act for their own inner truths and necessity, independent of the collective aspirations of civilization.

As a child I often visited large mental institutions in Dublin where my brother resided and I was deeply affected by the myriad diversity and the emancipation of human mental and bodily expression of his fellow residents. In our society we find extreme examples of human difference problematic and tend to lock these people away and limit unusual appearance and behavior through social control and stigmatization. Perhaps because of this we are also compelled and fascinated by difference and strangeness, desiring to witness its performance and suspecting we are each of us strange and broken too, desiring to see the beauty and freedom of the inexhaustible potential of otherness.

In the infamous asylum of Bedlam in late eighteenth-century London, the inmates organized and ran their own public performance of madness for paying publics. Throughout human history, we have always been fascinated with the performance of alterity and difference—it provides us with an unlikeness to our own communally agreed identities so we understand our self-construction more acutely. It produces images of mental and bodily freedom we cannot rehearse or enact easily within the limits of our social worlds. Shamans, witches, fools and artists have eternally provided this reflective and cathartic benefit to culture. The Performance Collective, with Subject to Ongoing Change, are good “service providers” in this lineage.

The fourteen days of performance were divided up daily into ninety-minute sessions where different combinations of the five performers worked in shifts alongside a four hour full group performance. This daily practice achieved a prolific creativity...