THE ANDERSON PROJECT:

A one man show at The Barbican Theatre
[An except from the programme notes:]
Freely inspired by two of Hans Christian Andersen's timeless fables, The Dryad and The Shadow, and drawn from the renowned Danish author's visit to France at the time of the Paris World's Fair, The Andersen Project picks up on some of Lepage's recurring interests – the counterpoint of romanticism and modernism, the tension between 'high' and 'low' art and the fragile bridge between the past and the present. However, in this new solo work, he also explores more troubling territories – questions of sexual identity, unfulfilled fantasies and the thirst for recognition and fame that are taken from Andersen's own life and writings which serve as a filigree to this modern tale.
In what has become a hallmark of his dazzling solo projects, Lepage weaves the story of a Quebecois artist whose travels and chance encounters take him on a voyage of understanding and self-discovery. In this new work, Lepage assumes the role of a distracted young writer, in Paris at the invitation of the Opera Gamier, commissioned to come up with the libretto for a children's opera based on an Andersen fairy tale.

LePage’s performances in London are all too brief and never to be missed. They always present a provocative and thoughtful work stimulating a new way of thinking about conventional notions from a new perspective.
He combines back projection, video filmed and projected during the performance and a number of unusual visual effects to unsettle the most common prejudices and traditional approaches to thought. It is more than magic / prestidigitation…it is pure fantasy, but firmly based in reality. His work is characterized as daring and inventive.
I have often found it quite spectacular.

Time to Re-think and Re-group

It seems as if it would be prudent to re-think my project for the final presentation.
Initially I was intent on exploring the nature of the fold in relation to constructions that comprised of my knitted substrates which involved exploring various 3 dimensional programs such as 3d max. I was interested not only in performing these multiples of actions in three dimensional Space, but also representing them in Time.
My initial experimenting focussed largely on the latter aspect of the problem which led to a prolonged encounter with various video editing programs and the implications of collecting and compiling clips and stills on a time line. This took a lot longer than I had initially anticipated and left very little time to properly encounter any further development of the dimensional aspect of my brief.
The final consensus therefore, of necessity has been to continue to concentrate on making a collage, collating and compiling various aspects of evidences on a time line in a Video Editing program.
Because the notation connected with recording knitting structures is often represented in a graphed format, this has become pivotal in my work.
I then will confine my efforts to exploring this connection.
I am reminded of an incident that occurred to me some time ago. I was very friendly with Irene and Jane Halsman , daughters of the Photographer Philippe Halsman. They recounted a project that he was working on with Salvador Dali. This was a video that was constructed around the idea of a ‘grid’ of boxes. Various objects were situated in each box. For example, in one box there were some motorcycles, in another some female models. Yet another held a group of Pigs and another contained some popcorn. As it was recounted to me, …the video recorded the popcorn as it flew up into the box with the pigs who then ate it; and the motorcycles flew over to the box where the women were and started to undress them. It seemed, at the time, to be very bizarre.
If I now were to work to a gird, could I adapt this idea of objects flying from one square to another in order to perform various actions ?
Deleuze and Guattari in Chapter 14 of their book ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ speak about ‘the smooth and the striated’, contrasting the two elements… nomad space and sedentary space as two opposites in nature. That is, a rigid and uncompromising space with a fluid and creative space. But they also add that the two exist only in mixture.
My knit stitch grid gives rise not to a fixed geometrically shaped substrate, but to one which more closely resembles an organic structure. In other words, I might attempt to convey the idea of this quality of morphing in my presentation as well as the notion of a conglomeration of elements [stitches] as a metaphor for the planes that are made of up innumerable monads collected representing the accumulation of tensions within the piece.

ORIGAMI

The British Origami Society, London Mini-meeting
Saturday 14th January, 2006 2:00pm to 5:00pm
Queen Elizabeth Hall, Foyer
This was an opportunity to exchange techniques and ‘folds’ for new models with people visiting from Holland, Switzerland and Germany.
Several different new foldings were demonstrated and taught. We all gathered in a group around some tables and various people took turns demonstrating their folded models. We folded a butterfly, a frog, a ‘wooden shoe’ [from Holland] and a quite elaborate top which was made from three pieces of paper.
Each section was folded separately and then the three sections were combined.
With all these models, the trick is to remember the process and then to practice it afterwards. If it is possible the steps can be diagrammed. Sometimes they have already been recorded, but this is not always the case.
During the process of unfolding to aid the diagrammatic record, it becomes easier to remember the steps.
This kind of folding and diagramming relates back to the processes that are involved in establishing my knit work and subsequent construction processes and techniques.
Folding of paper, mimics the folding of the knitted substrate. The notion of layering and compositing also has reflections in my project. The images that I edit in the presentation are layered and nested in the time line.