Outi Condit: The Actress The Sequel The Lead The Diva (screening), or, Writing As Between
In 2017, I worked together with theatre director and fellow doctoral research fellow Vincent Roumagnac to make the stage piece The Actress, which became the first clearly defined artefact to be produced by my research process. Its success strengthened my conviction to keep producing objects, even, or perhaps especially, when the object is the researcherly body itself.
During the past years I have provoked, performed and assembled research apparatuses around the elusive experience of being “more than one, less than many”, inhabited and moulded by relations, matters, (secret) agents, machines, and ghosts, yet still managing to find some space to wriggle. Repeatedly re-inventing “actorly” positions through collaborations has become a recurrent research strategy. Now, as the research winds towards its (however partial and provisional) sedimentation as “commentary”, this strategy asks to become recognised as writing.
In Spring 2021, Vincent and I came together again to produce work which is simultaneously an independent piece and the final act of our initial collaboration. We used layered video projection and aural remediation to frame, once and for all, that promiscuous research-object-animal, The Actress, in a Russian doll act of a machine in a machine in a machine.
My presentation will be a screening of The Actress The Sequel The Lead The Diva (approx 10 min) accompanied by a short talk on Writing As Between, introducing my experiences of writing (why call it that?) through undisciplined collaborations and transmedial translations.
Bio
I am an actor and performance maker currently finishing my artistic doctoral project How to be a Medium? at the Performing Arts Research Centre. In my research I make use of the unfixedness of the actorly stance to tinker with the integrity of staged bodies and bodies-as-stages. My methods include techno-metabolic theatrics and undisciplined collaborations, through which I make art, learn, and teach.