Playing With MySelf / Scorezer0

Playing With MySelf was a full-length solo scratch performance created, devised and performed by Robert Jude Daniels with directorial help and additional material from Guy Dartnell.

Playing’…pays homage to Beckett’s stark existential and minimal writing, and looks like a cross between live art, new dance, and slap-stick vaudeville (BAC publicity)

Playing…’ is an interdisciplinary physical performance that tells the story of a performer prior to curtain-up, nervously waiting and pacing through a tiring routine, playing with a silent partner who is a variously a duet partner, a puppet and a effigy of the main performer. As the piece progresses it moves from a detailed and funny but largely surface study of time/waiting/anxiety/non-performance to a deeper reflection on repetition, memory relived, déjà vu and absence/presence.  The piece starts with an act of endurance that ultimately ends in tragedy, with the show collapsing in on itself in worst possible way.

Scorezer0 is a sequel, or sorts (this was planned as a trilogy). An interdisciplinary dance-performance, scored and devised by over 50 authors, artists, writers, scholars – and the public.

A Sisyphean task at its heart. Over the last 2 years, a number of high profile national and international practitioners, as well as writers, scholars and the public, have been asked to contribute scores or instructions for movement and performance by Text/phone, Email, Postcards/letters and any other means of communication that contribute to a performance where I perform all the tasks suggested, and strictly to the demands of the author.

Each individual score is available to watch online, and the main work (live improvisation/film installation) toured to galleries and art centres across the UK.

This project is supported and mentored by artists in the RALP funded Choreographic Lab (Jane Bacon, Yvon Bonenfant, Gill Clarke, Guy Dartnell, Anna Furse, Sara Giddens, Vida Midgelow and Kerryn Wise); a research and development environment where the practical and critical development of choreographic practice is investigated and enriched by the support of others.

The practical premise of this work continues concepts and themes from playing with mySelf: and is the second part of a theoretical and theatrical trilogy of work that explores new disciplines in dance and theatre composition, and develops a unique physical and visual approach to making work.