The New Zealand Film Archive
Auckland Exhibition Space | August – September 2012
Media Gallery, Wellington | February – April 2013

A script and a recording bookend a performance: two points of stillness that open and close an act and all that is at play.

Sitting poised ahead of speech, a script is a plan and a directive to action. The script’s iteration fulfils its intention, but it is an inherently passive object; it waits to be acted.  A recording, on the other hand, confounds the usually transitory nature of performance.  Documenting the act, a film holds the actions of the players in a loop and then waits to be seen.

These works deal with the performance of objects in stasis.  The objects – the film and the script – become the performers rather than the medium for the performance.

After his death, when clearing out his house, Mum found Uncle Roger’s furled script from a 1960 school production of Toad of Toad Hall (a dramatization of Wind in the Willows) in which he starred as Toad.  Illicitly unreturned and then kept by him for fifty-one years, this script is a record of breath expended, words spoken, lines acted.  Loosed from its original use, the script’s fragile pages turn through once again to reveal the lines, notes and drawings of its now-absent actor.

Alongside, the film is removed from narrative sequence into occupying three-dimensional space and the characters act their separate shots simultaneously.  The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: “The Contest”, Scene 41 takes the protagonists of this dusty Spaghetti Western and forces them back into their penultimate standoff at Sadhill Cemetery.  They perpetually continue to quietly, yet disquietingly, stare at each other across the space.

Photographs by Yoon Tae Kim