I escaped the drudgery today and drove in spring sunshine out to Tinatgel, N Cornwall. I had a feeling that I needed a session on my own, not sure if I’d lost my ‘mojo’. The evening before I’d prepared a performance score for Rebecca to perform at The Month Of Performance Art in Berlin. I was unsure about this, also wondering if I had lost my interest in art. It was interesting to have someone perform it. Turning an idea into action. This thought I carried with me as I went bouldering and maybe for the first time since completing my PhD the art and bouldering came together.

This is the link to the MPAB and programme   http://www.mpa-b.org/22-may-2015.html

The score outlines an  ‘event of equivalence’  rather than a representation of the bouldering  experience.

The performance engenders a new ‘moment, which can be described as ‘an event of equivalence’, Created in the space that borrows from both bouldering and art. In the event of equivalence problems of subject and object relations are addressed in a creative context and demonstrates that meaning arises as a result of a discursive, expressive encounter, where meaning can be regarded as emergent and enactive rather than fixed.

The performer stands alone in the space with a chair. It’s indicated that the performer will at some point make a leap into the unknown, using the chair as a launch point. The performer will indicate that this leap is an equivalent of the leaps made in bouldering as the boulderer moves dynamically from hold to hold.

The performance is intended to render new orientations of human movement and creative possibilities, as a staging of ‘meaning- in-the- making’.

The proposition stated in the previous paragraph, which was that meaning emerges in a creative sense is articulated by Sally Anne Ness* as she describes the screaming that an American boulderer makes as he moves over the rock, as movements that, ‘were conceived corporeally, in unconventional, unintended, spontaneous movement processes. I [Ness] term these latter movements of significance, instances of meaning-in-the-making’. Ness goes on to suggest that the screams ‘describe an embodied ability to process significance intelligently without recourse to contemplative, self-conscious, or subjective theorizing’. I’m not sure the grunts I make are quite the same as this and I’m not sure what my tourette like swearing outbursts after falling, mean either, but in plain english the meaning is spontaneous and unrehearsed, live and in the moment.

[*] Sally Anne Ness, 2011 Bouldering in Yosemite: Emergent Signs of Place and Landscape, American Anthropologist, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1548-

Images below from ‘an event of equivalence’ CAZ, Penzance, 2013

Below is a short film of the problem AWOL The Apprentice 7C