Into the Good Night (Go)

'Into the Good Night (Go)' is the title for a series of conjoined performance installations undertaken between November 2012 and March 2013. Bringing together concerns about the training involved in bearing witness to live performance practice, the role of the body as archival source and our interest in non-western body-based practices, 'Into the Good Night (Go)' foregrounds an exploration of shared authorship alongside consideration of participatory strategies between the work and its spectator. The two iterations of this installation sought to encourage conversations around the role of the witness in the generation of knowledge., Having its inception in a range of earlier performance experiments (including, but not exclusive to the durational site-specific performance exploration 'That Infra Thing - parts 1 & 2', performed at The Place, August 2010, workshop collaborations with Simon Ellis and Colin Poole, and a performance paper entitled 'Conjecture/Contexture', Plymouth University, 23 February 2012), this project sought to consider questions of impermanence, loss and the inevitable biological failure associated with age through the filter of Taoist, Buddhist and Vedantic philosophy. The Taoist concept of the twinned soul (hun and po) became a way of exploring the difference/same-ness that has informed our performance practice, and it was through these ideas of loss and separation that we began to explore the space that durational practice allows for failure. The failure inherent in both iterations of 'Into The Good Night (Go)' was never positioned as a negative, simply an expected and encouraged strategy for development.