Requiem (2011)
ArtLab11: Slow Reveal
Shopfront Contemporary Arts & Performance, Sydney
Solo work produced as part of residency
Creator / Performer: Bernice Ong
Multimedia / Set: Bernice Ong
Assistants: Kieth Yap, Kevin Ng, Sophie Pekbilimli
Music: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Requiem in D Minor, K. 626: I. Introitus: Requiem)
Through the course of the residency, I had moved from a preoccupation with navigating the deep blue of the ocean with its physical and its psychological associations, to the terrors I would feel so intensely upon the sight of a single cockroach. To put this process in context, I was in the same year simultaneously putting together my honours thesis on the experience of encountering and creating transitional spaces in performance, and keeping an audience captured within the orienting phase as they attempt to make sense of foreign environments. I wanted the viewer's effort to make meaning be somewhat consuming and disorienting. This residency process in many ways, was about channeling these emotions around the unknown to a shared experience or space. I was interested to explore this through playing with temporality, movement, symbolic gesture and music, spatial design, and the pure act of observation on the part of the audience.
Using cockroaches was a way for me to combat my fears. I wanted real cockroaches, but had trouble handling them. And so, I folded paper cockroaches. I then started thinking about fears. And death. And existence and identity. And perhaps the demise of a cultural identity. Grappling with cockroaches and its associative circumstances (unseen, small, feared, dark places), a black/white colour theme, stacked television sets, and my solitary high cultured white-faced persona, gradual experiments uncovered a desire to explore symbolically the death of culture, its rebirth, its cycle, and its non-clarity.
BO
ArtLab11: Slow Reveal
Shopfront Contemporary Arts & Performance, Sydney
Solo work produced as part of residency
Creator / Performer: Bernice Ong
Multimedia / Set: Bernice Ong
Assistants: Kieth Yap, Kevin Ng, Sophie Pekbilimli
Music: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Requiem in D Minor, K. 626: I. Introitus: Requiem)
Through the course of the residency, I had moved from a preoccupation with navigating the deep blue of the ocean with its physical and its psychological associations, to the terrors I would feel so intensely upon the sight of a single cockroach. To put this process in context, I was in the same year simultaneously putting together my honours thesis on the experience of encountering and creating transitional spaces in performance, and keeping an audience captured within the orienting phase as they attempt to make sense of foreign environments. I wanted the viewer's effort to make meaning be somewhat consuming and disorienting. This residency process in many ways, was about channeling these emotions around the unknown to a shared experience or space. I was interested to explore this through playing with temporality, movement, symbolic gesture and music, spatial design, and the pure act of observation on the part of the audience.
Using cockroaches was a way for me to combat my fears. I wanted real cockroaches, but had trouble handling them. And so, I folded paper cockroaches. I then started thinking about fears. And death. And existence and identity. And perhaps the demise of a cultural identity. Grappling with cockroaches and its associative circumstances (unseen, small, feared, dark places), a black/white colour theme, stacked television sets, and my solitary high cultured white-faced persona, gradual experiments uncovered a desire to explore symbolically the death of culture, its rebirth, its cycle, and its non-clarity.
BO
