Kate van der Drift

Push to Talk by Kate van der Drift and Clare Fleming performed at Qubit - A Weekend of Performance Art in Port Chalmers Dunedin 2011.  

A metaphorical voice of the Ocean speaks to Land; A one way poetic script transmitted over two-way radios which imagines and represents a voice from the margin, calling to the centre, encouraging and pleading for connection. One walkie talkie is outside the perimeter of the gallery and the other receives from within the gallery. During the performance WAO perform the role of the centre and the margin, for we are are part of the privileged/majority and underprivileged/minority groups. We ask for understanding and compromise and for the listener to move toward the margin while imagining what it would be like to decentre and decolonise ourselves.

Performed a second time at Peace Gallery, Auckland in May 2013 As part of One Day Wonder Series

Interview between We Are Optimistic and Julie Vulcan about Push To Talk a work performed at Qubit Weekend of Performance Art

Julie: Your work deals with transmissions and searches for connections rather than disconnections. Can you talk about how you constructed the work and what you imagined the audience might feel?

WAO: Push-to-Talk was made collaboratively over a great distance, Kate is currently working and traveling in Europe and the Middle East and Clare is holding down the fort in Dunedin.   We were invited to make a work for Qubit, and chose to continue our collective working approach regardless of the great ocean between us. This vast space inspired the dialogue of the work; we imagined the ocean being a connecting body rather than a division between us, we imagined both putting our feet in our respective seas as a way to touch one another.  

The script Clare read during the performance was the imagining of a voice from the margin, calling out to the centre, encouraging and pleading for a connection, a move from the comfort of the everyday space. Here we hoped to give a voice to an underprivileged perspective.  Collectively we call ourselves We Are Optimistic and our aim is to make art that hopes to inspire social change.   We visualized ourselves as both the centre and the margin, for we are part of privileged or majority and under-privileged or minority groups.  We were asking for understanding and compromise and for others to move themselves away from the centre but also imagining what it would be like to decentre and decolonize ourselves.

The work was constructed and inspired by conversation.  The script was written back and forth over the course of a few months.  Working on a boat Kate was surrounded by ocean, not having touched land for weeks on end she would blog about her lack of desire for land, her comfort with the floating placelessness, as well as her worries and thoughts about all things to do with living on a boat and bouncing around the rim of the Mediterranean Sea.  Clare responded by putting these feelings and reflections into an abstract narrative form.  On the boat Kate talked to her co-workers via walkie talkies, and so we became interested in them as a communication tool: the language you use is different, and we liked the connotations of distance, emergency, directness, and of course code names are fun. As the script emerged we began to imagine that there were no answers to the requests from the margin. It was the land that could not reply to the ocean and it’s radical ideas of connectedness. This missing voice initially mirrored Kate’s absence here in Dunedin, but it transformed to represent the lack of dialogue from those in a comfortable position of privilege. This absence within the script stirs a feeling of sadness and tension within us and we guessed that the audience would sense this too.  While making this work, we wanted the performance to be experimental and intuitive, but as this way of working was new for us it was difficult to know how the audience might respond. Our previous dialogue based works have been more expressly participatory with two way conversations happening in installation spaces, so we didn’t plan for any particular response. 

Julie: How did you feel during the performance with that distance from the “centre” and not knowing how it was revealing itself in there?

Clare: During the performance I stood outside the perimeter fence of the Qubit venue, about 10 metres from the building. I couldn’t see into the property and I didn’t know how the audience would respond or what might happen inside the building. I had one walkie talkie and the other was on full volume, a microphone beside it sitting on a stool in the centre of the darkened hall. As I began to perform the voice of the margin, I assumed that there would always be silence during my pauses, that the audience would be sitting in silent contemplation, for me this script was sad and rather serious. About half way through, during a pause I heard ambient noises and a distant voice coming through the transmission. I continued and in the next pause I could hear laughter and talking, I recognized a voice… I was a little perplexed. Is this work funny? If they were trying to communicate with me, why couldn’t I hear them, surely they could hear me? It was a foreign experience, I was somewhere between a conscious anxiety that the performance would ‘work’ and partially lost in the voice I projected. I wished I could see into the hall.

Afterwards, did you have any personal insights to the work and what you were exploring?

Clare: After the performance I pieced together what had taken place inside the hall from bits and pieces of audience recollection. It wasn’t until the panel discussion at the end of the weekend that I fully grasped what had transpired.  Feeling compassionate frustration at my continuing yearning to be heard, responded to, listened to, the audience decided to try to communicate with me. What followed was a comedy of errors. The technology of the walkie talkie proved alien to the brave few who dared to venture to the centre spotlight and attempt to talk back. At first they tried the microphone then used the walkie talkie like a cell phone, the audience still seated became frustrated, trying to explain how to reach me in vain, hence the laughter I heard. Perhaps while listening the audience felt some accountability, guilt and obligation, which is what the voice of the margin was asking for but we didn’t realize it would be taken literally as the performance transpired. 

The technical problems that arose from the audience during the performance perfectly mirrored the frustration and difficulty that can arise when trying to break down social barriers of inequality. Dialogue isn’t easy, especially between groups and individuals whose power is unequal. Privilege gets in the way. While performing this work I felt many of the emotions that we intended to portray in our script. By my physical distance and lack of control over the response of the audience, I experienced the alienation and desire from the script in the real.