Performance-based Filmmaking - 
The Nature of the Poetic Image in Motion and its Performativity

                                                                                                                                                                           with VestAndPage 

"Let us use the camera as a tool for reflection, rather than limiting it to a device that records appearances. Let us use it to shape a moving image that emerges from within and through us, blending with what is out there.
Let us use it to show the world as it appears to us. Visions vanish if not captured." –
VestAndPage

"Everyone who makes films has to be an athlete to a certain degree because cinema does not come from abstract academic thinking; it comes from your knees and thighs." —  Werner Herzog 

WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION

This intensive workshop is dedicated to performance-based filmmaking’s conceptual, aesthetic, and practical aspects. This field exists at a dynamic intersection of two art forms: body-based performance art and filmmaking. To inquire into the pillars that constitute the cross-contamination of those two practices, we expand upon the “Poetics of Relations”, the embodied research we have pursued since 2006, to discuss some of the conditions and methods of performance-based film work production and presentation. It involves exploring the differentiation between objective and subjective points of view and perspectives while performing for the video camera and how to allow the viewers to receive what the performers experience. During the Workshop, we will watch a series of excerpts from performance-based films that help illustrate and refine our discussions of the difficulties accompanying these problems. Attention is placed on exploring the similarities and variations between the realization of imaginary worlds and the interpretation of reality as it appears to the eye.
In this course, we do not teach filmmaking or editing techniques. Instead, we address the essential questions such as: 
•    The difference between video and film work; 
•    The reasons why to choose a specific topic; 
•    Scouting locations; 
•    Performing for the camera, even in extreme conditions; 
•    How to forge a personal poetics; 
•    The role of spoken word, music and sound; 
•    How to structure a (non-linear) narrative through moving images; 
•    Production and post-production of a performance-based film. 

Theoretical components include the analysis of excerpts from performance-based films we reckon fundamental to the development of the practice. In this, we reflect on the differences between video documentation of performance art and performance-for-camera, the nature of the poetic image and its performativity, the use of space, time, objects, the human body concerning the technical medium, the physical side of film production, site-specific performance work, guerrilla tactics vs bureaucracy, and sustainability. 

Practical assignments aim to enhance participants’ creative endeavour, action and genuine expression, the private as the political, memory activation, and one’s inner universe to explore reality autonomously. Participants are invited to create performance-based video works intended as possible seeds for performance-based films and consider their motivations, urgencies, concepts, inspirations, visions, challenges, and expectations in collective feedback sessions. The restitution of the online course foresees a final presentation of the produced performance-based video works.

The workshop is taught on September 14, 21, 28, and October 5, 19, 2024; 4-7PM CET

PREREQUISITES

The only formal prerequisite for this course is at least one previous work, either a performance or a video.

Program

 

About VestAndPage
 

This workshop is co-facilitated by VestAndPage (Verena Stenke and Andrea Pagnes), artist duo and producers of five awarded performance-based films, founders and curators of the Venice International Performance Art Week; lecturers at Master of Performance Practices at ArtEZ University of the Arts, and MA Performance of the Norwegian Theater Academy. To learn more about VestAndPage's works and background visit their website

To enroll please send an email to: info@ecc-performanceart.eu