Excerpt from Telling Time

Papers, performances and images from Playworks Playing With Time Festival held at the Wharf Theatre, Sydney 13-15 October, 1995

Edited by Virginia Baxter

Used with kind permission of

The Author and Publishers

a dialogue with disjunction

jenny kemp

TIMEKEEPER COLLEEN CHESTERMAN PLAYS PATIENCE AT THE TABLE.

JENNY KEMP STANDS AT THE MICROPHONE THROUGHOUT HER PRESENTATION,

SHE SHOWS VIDEO EXCERPTS FROM HER ELEGANT AND EVOCATIVE WORKS

(INCLUDING CALL OF THE WILD, SWEET DREAMS AND REMEMBER),

AGAIN, FOR MOST OF THE AUDIENCE

A TANTALISING TASTE OF WORK THEY ARE UNLIKELY TO HAVE SEEN OUTSIDE MELBOURNE.

THE GOOD NEWS IS THAT HER NEW WORK BLACK SEQUIN DRESS

WAS COMMISSIONED FOR THE 1996 ADELAIDE FESTIVAL.

I think our culture mistakenly thinks that knowledge and wisdom are the same things…

Real growth comes in the feeling life, in the inner life, by being able to tolerate uncertainty and ambiguity long enough to sustain oneself in doubt and uncertainty without an irritable reaching for reason.

Australian Jungian psychologist, Peter O'Connor

1. A FEELING OF DISJUNCTION

…as you walk down the skeet you see the real world but feel aware of an 'inner world'. My work attempts a dialogue with this disjunction. Societal time frame often leaves us at odds, or out of phase with ourselves and the world. This disjunction is uncomfortably emphasised.

Oh god, am I late? I never have any time

Consequently communication at a deeper level within the psyche is often not possible and access to inner resources is cut off. This tight linear organisation of time amounts to a political act of domination.

Based on the premise that any ordinary action has extraordinary resonances, the intention is to liberate the audience from the usual constraints of convention, especially those of time, and provoke an imaginative and associative engagement with image and text. Memory, dream, fantasy, desire and myth are asked to play more active and creative roles.

2. CONVENTIONAL THEATRE STRUCTURES

Our dramatic structures have for far too long simulated our society's social structures and its linear relationship to time which, while intending a critique, often results in reinforcing those structures and causing a cut‑off point in the psyche of the audience.

I was originally a theatre director. However I found it hard to find plays that wanted to direct. Thankfully this is now beginning to change, but it was one of the main reasons for my beginning to write. I also found an absence of texts which were expressing or prepared to explore the psyche enough.

3. DREAMS

I have always found dreams full of extraordinary information, always a source of wonder, and often guidance, and have tried to build into my life and work ways of listening to them. Also, the form of the dream has influenced my work. Firstly, the dream actually occurs simultaneously, not in a linear structure: only as we try to remember the dream do we organise it into beginning, middle and end. Secondly, a dream has a dreamer who often watches him/herself in the dream. I find it interesting to meditate on this relationship as parallel to the audience/performer relationship. The performance becomes the audience's dream.

4. MYTHS

Reading the I Ching and looking at myths has always informed my understanding of life patterns and structures and therefore helps my ability to construct a dramatic grid from my writing.

Some real life events that have influenced me:

5. VISUAL ARTS

My father was an abstract expressionist painter, and so I grew up looking into these frames. Mostly I notice that a painting of this nature removes all time constraints for and in the viewer. A painting is static and asks its viewer to become active, internally active/meditative. In conventional theatre forms, the performance is often active/often ‑didactic and can cause its audience to become too passive. I want to stimulate a relationship between the performance and the audience which allows for a greater interplay between the active and passive possibilities of both. To this end, I feel it is essential to build a dramatic structure which disrupts conventional time frames/patterns.

I often use the paintings of the surrealist artist Paul Delvaux as an inspiration for the design and the mise en scene in my work. Because they always remind me that the world on stage is a timeless place, a kind of landscape of the psyche where anything can happen.

6. MENTAL ILLNESS

I have always had close relationships to people with mental illness and these have developed a strong desire in me to understand the inner world of the psyche more deeply and its connection to the everyday world.

7. CHOICE

In the end my work is perhaps the result of a choice to investigate the psyche and its ability to function creatively.

AS JENNY KEMP MOVES FROM THE MICROPHONE, NIKKI HEYW000

MOVES THROUGH THE AUDIENCE.