Stephen O’Connell

Shift Abstract: bluemouth Inc. is a site-specific intermedial performance troupe with split residence in New York City, Toronto, and Montreal. Aggressively collaborative and interdisciplinary in their approach, their material consistently brings both traditional theatrical and event-based performative conventions into problematic and unpredictable collision. As both the company’s dramaturge and a performance scholar, my work within this volatile creative terrain has focused, in particular, on the possibility and nature of intimacy in site-specific intermedial environments. At PSi #13 in New York City I collaborated with two members of Bluemouth on a performance presentation entitled IntiMedia: An Interaction on Intimacy in Intermedia. The 20 minute presentation involved a telescoped version of a one-hour performance piece and combined video projection and a pre-recorded soundscape with three live, simultaneous spoken tracks and choreographed physical movement. At PSi #14 in Copenhagen I extended this discussion with a preliminary presentation on Bluemouth’s most recent and ambitious project: a five-hour audience elimination event fashioned after the American dance marathons of the 1920s and 1930s. Conceived as a dance marathon with theatrical aspects, this 200-participant event pushes the fragile balance of theatricality and performative action in Bluemouth’s work to unprecedented extremes. For PSi #16 in Toronto I am proposing a collaborative event involving me and the members of Bluemouth. Dancing with (200) Strangers, adopting the theme of the company’s current project, Dance Marathon, will involve a series of events, including the full 45 minute performance piece IntiMedia; an interactive theoretical discussion of intimacy as it is understood within psychoanalytical, sociological, anthropological, and communication studies discourses; an interactive enactment (as opposed to re-enactment) of material from the full production of Dance Marathon (which premiered at Toronto’s World Stage International Theatre Festival in February 2009); and a round table discussion with core and associate members of Bluemouth focusing on specific and general developmental processes.