Jimmy Robert and Ian White
Marriage à la Mode et Cor Anglais.
Theatre, Monday 11 May 2009, 7pm
"It is not by painting that photography touches art, but by theatre." Roland Barthes
"To be alert is to be decorative." Frank O'Hara
Marriage à la Mode et Cor Anglais explores a boundary between the still image and movement via repetition, artificiality, posing and mortality. Choreographed for the theatre, it combines text, music and image into a language of stylized actions that we developed over a four-week period at STUK during August and October 2007.We speak four times during the piece, presenting a collage of sentences from Roland Barthes' La Chambre Claire (Camera Lucida) and the stage instructions of plays written by the American poet Frank O'Hara.
The first time we speak we combine Barthes with O'Hara, the second and third times (in French and English respectively) is a juxtaposition of sentences from different sections of Barthes, and the final time from O'Hara. We consider these texts not as a primary, driving narrative, but as a formal element in the work, like the movement of a hand or the folds of a curtain.
In the last work we made together, 6 things we couldn't do, but can do now (Tate Britain, 2004), a series of relaxed, sometimes abstract actions translated the act of spending time together into a near-silent, 50-minute piece, the last section of which was a performance including Yvonne Rainer's seminal 1966 dance Trio A. Marriage à la Mode et Cor Anglais explores an opposite set of coordinates to 6 things we couldn't do, but can do now to construct a more paradoxical but no less urgent immediate present.
Credits: Music, Chronologically the Landing of the Spirit of '76 (2' 22”), from John Adams' opera Nixon in China / End of Act II (C. 10”); from Alban Berg's opera Lulu/A Composition by Hypo (2' 30”). Robes by David Ramirez. Stage hands: Liam Cobb, Dorothy Allen-Pickard. Technicians: Tim Anderson, Julio Pereira. Concept and performance by Jimmy Robert and Ian White.
Download the programme note from the performance (pdf, 585k)
Video production by Lightweight Media.