Well, what a weekend. Durational perforamnce, done. Body and mind, broken.
The museum part of the performance went for over 2 hours (I thought it wouldnt possibly go longer than an hour!) during which I broke my little toe. I think it went well. But would love some feedback and critisms from anyone who was there. It was pretty intense and as now seems to be the case my performance's are never very planed and the few things that are often don't happen. I was pretty exhausted by the end of it, and I'm sure my audience were to. Good on you people of Dartmoor, it was so fantastic to see people there and indure the whole the thing.
Exhausted or not i still had a 68 km walk to Shelly Beach ahead of me. I set off into the night, high on post-performance adrenaline, with Damien by my side (tim's dad, performance documentor, mule, macheine). We walked for 4 hours, covering close to 20 km before sliding into sleeping bags and hugging the hard ground of Moleside in Lower Glenelg National Park.
The next day is still a bit of an epic blur, I have never been so exhausted. By the end I was so cold from the batering wind it hurt and was making me feel sick. We we're silent. To tired to converse.
After getting lost in a bush maze which should have been 0.7km and lead to the main road, we were picked up. That last bit was agonising, everytime we poped up out the scrub we could see the road, but it was never any closer, allways out of reach.
I could not do the beach perofrmance, my hands were shaking, the wind was too strong and my mind was gone. The realization of this was at first crushing, I felt I had failed. On reflection soon after, I felt I had given everything I could to my work to the point of my own numb destruction. And this was satisfying.
A few lines of text floated into my mind whilst walking, and I repeated them silently like mantras inside my head. The rythum kept me going. They were concieved when mentaly very tired, and I'm not sure of they're quality. But this is curious in itself, they do not exist by themselves, but are part of the walk and can not be seportated from that. They do not stand alone.
*Distance
Indurance
Duration
*Cut me out and stencil me in
Black
*Dunes duna duna, I want to go home
*Sand traces human traces
Plastic noise
*Beat my back blue
*Ive come from Dartmoor to see, to sea
63 km, 1 tampon and a broken toe
Ok anoyingly this won't publish the text how I have written it- so instead a * denotes a new block and capital letters are at the beginning of each new line. If anyone knows why it dosn't look the same on the blog page as it does when composing please help!
