FrenchMottershead Interview - Jennie Klein 12th February 2006, NRLA, Glasgow Reproduced courtesy of New Moves International. FrenchMottershead is a London-based live art collaborative who since 1999 have created and developed an approach called microperformance to explore the details of urban and social life. In 2006, they, along with Richard Dedomenici, were the artists in residence at the National Review of Live Art (NRLA) the longest running live art festival in the UK. Their association with the NRLA began in 2004, when they showed up uninvited and initiated guerrilla actions with an edition of their The People Series from an impromptu stall set-up in the Arches’ main bar. In 2005 they returned as invited artists, and from site research and one-to-one conversational interviews with audience members (called micro-classes) created and facilitated The Enarelay, which involved handing out microperformance instructions to audience members queuing up for the various performances, on their way to the toilets, or standing in the bar, who could then decide whether or not they wanted to “perform” the suggested actions. In 2006, they premiered three pieces: A Daily Ritual To Capture the Presence of Everybody, Local Review of Necessary Amenities (LRNA), and Now That’s An Idea. In this interview, which took place on the second to last day of the festival, Rebecca French and Andrew Mottershead reflected on the success of the NRLA 2006. JK: I would like to start by asking you to define microperformance and to give me some sort of background on how you came to develop this format. Do you feel it is more successful because you are a collaborative duo rather than a single individual? RF: We define microperformance as a series of one on one actions or performances that are performed on and by an active audience. That definition has evolved and is probably changing even as we speak. AM: Essentially, we invite the audience to engage complicity in the creative act. In time it’s become a flexible format, we’ve developed different ways to devise and prompt microperformance, from performing them ourselves, to large scale projects incorporating research, workshops and live events that activate local constituencies as microperformers, to distributing performance instructions using objects, text messaging and verbal delivery in a variety of social frameworks. The outcomes vary in response to the context – which is key to our work. AM: When we started off we wanted to come up with a way of making work which wouldn’t be the ‘traditional intervention into the audience kind of work’ where it was obvious that something is going on because that person over there is a performer or something, coming off the stage and into the audience but still maintaining the audience and performer division. We wanted to work with a different dynamic that would dissolve this division and arrive at a more enriching experience all round. I may be digressing here, but this is before we had the form or the phrase microperformance and we were just looking for a way to describe the work that we wanted to do. We were interested in the small things that people wanted to do between and with each other… RF: Performatively every day. There are automatic “performances” that we all do, and we wanted to work around that. For example, we are all sitting forward, looking at each other during this interview. If someone started to look up at the sky we would get very nervous. AM: Yes, Yes. We also found that we were increasingly getting more interested in working with the skills that people already had—the performative aspects of looking at body language and microtechnologies, the Foucauldian idea that even the way you move your hands and the tiniest gestures and the context in which you are in are powerful tools that can be manipulated, and that we are consciously or unconsciously in control of or being subjected too. Page 1 of 12 JK: I think that also references J.L. Austin’s ideas in How To Do Things With Words, where the words have action potential. I see your work as very much playing into that idea. AM: For much of our recent work we’ve put the verb very much in the foreground. We thought that these ideas constituted being a microperformer and the idea of the microperformance evolved as well. RF: Before we met, Andrew used to run Karaoke’s as artworks, activating the audience as a performer/art work. AM: I did one at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London. RF: We both did types of site-based performance. We started to work together. We were working with another group of friends as well. We were all doing performances in a social situation. We hired a room in the upstairs of a working man’s club. Downstairs the members were singing songs for pints, upstairs held our club Social. We were crossing the two audiences over. They were coming up and the others were going down. AM: And we just invited people along for a party, didn’t we? RF: Well, we framed it as an art work. AM: It was an art work/party. That was an alternative live art platform looking at social rituals and roles. How do expectations shape experience? At what point do we question whether something is real or performed? We took on each venue's characteristics and added subtle interactions activating audience and performer with many exaggerated social behaviors. RF: But we had lots of intervention performances like the coatroom attendant would take off your coat and sort of breathe down your neck and these sorts of things. AM: There was a stripper and we pretended that we’d got married… RF: that afternoon, because it was the sort of place where people have their engagement parties, and their christenings, and their wakes and it was just sort of a community space. AM: We pulled out a lot of material… RF: A lot of things. And what we found from that was that we were really, really interested in the actions that have that ambiguity, where it wasn’t just another person obviously performing but the thing was to activate the audience in some way to sort of respond in a way where they weren’t sure, but they suspected, or went along. So that was about six years ago where the kernel of this came from. AM: I think it was only in about 2000 that we came up with and started using the phrase microperformance, actor or performer just did not seem to be adequate words to describe what we wanted to work with… RF: Yes, in terms of how we talk about and frame these actions and these small performances and label them. AM: So in that sense it would be Friday Social Evening at the West Indian Ex- Services Association… Page 2 of 12 RF: A performance piece using venues that weren’t art venues and activating those for one night only…opening them up to another type of audience. AM: As far as collaborating, we feel that it definitely makes a difference that we are a duo, rather than working as individuals. Each one motivates the other to get up and go into the studio that day. In developing the various works, we both have a different perspective, experience or observation of contexts, which helps keep a certain flux. Accepting the different ways that we can do the same thing is also important. RF: Yes. JK: So in a way, the NRLA is kind of a departure for the two of you because you are encountering an audience that expects you, whereas normally you don’t have that audience. AM: I think it would be a departure if we were to be encountering the audience in one of the usual NRLA forms, i.e. in the black box on stage with rake seating, or in an installation or as a one-on-one etc. But we’ve positioned ourselves at the NRLA alongside but outside of those expected territories, so in a way what we are asking for is the audience to depart from their expectations when encountering an artist’s [our] work – that these alternatives are valid forms. I think also the work we’ve done during the residency has raised the level of what could be expected from future AiRs (artist in residence). Usually artists showcase their latest work and maybe hold a talk. Few have ever made a number of works specifically for that audience. RF: In addition, we have always told people exactly what is going to happen. That is part of the framing of our work, you tell people they are going to experience this performance, or that this “performer” might come up to you and do something or ask you to do something. You are told that and everybody expects that. We do always frame that by telling people. But definitely a couple of years ago we were in a situation where we thought we have been working for a couple of years and we don’t work in the art world so we aren’t getting any attention in the art world, so we started to think more about how we could work within the context of the art world. AM: So in turn, what we think of as being the definition of microperformance has kind of expanded. It has got the same root but we would have to go back to the dictionary and add two or three more meanings to the word.