Róisín O’Gorman:

Róisín O’Gorman is a Lecturer in the Department of Theatre, School of Film, Music & Theatre at University College Cork. Róisín's current research lives between embodied practices and theoretical understandings of performance. She explores this interdisciplinary terrain through somatic practice which offers an embodied ground to her theoretical and media based work. Email: r.ogorman@ucc.ie

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Michael R. Murphy:

Professor in Performance, Film and Interactive Media,, School of Visual and Media Arts, University of Montana, Missoula, MT michael.murphy@mso.umt.edu

Michael  is a faculty member of the School of Visual and Media Arts at the University of Montana, where he began working after a career as an actor in theatre, film and television in New York City and Los Angeles. Since then he has worked as a director and creator across multiple disciplines, including theatre, film and opera, as well as interactive media design and installation work.

This paper discusses an ongoing artistic research project “Remember we are falling” and a particular installation Falling Gardens: Part 1 Angel of Histories.  This collaboration considers the ongoingness of stories of unspeakable histories and crises that are on a scale beyond our everyday perceptions. These stories emerge from and at the ends of empire of the conference call. The work developed through processes that explore the poetics of perception through our shared and divergent practices in movement, writing and visual processes. Using devised scores which gathered story fragments, architectural structures, and movement focussed on the lexicons of falling.  We riffed on the intertwining images of ‘fallen women’ alongside the long fall of the earth through space, as well as the various myths of falls from grace, gardens, and power.  Allowing for randomized dramaturgical forms to emerge, the piece formed into a multi-channel installation which explores the aftermaths of the end(s) of the impact of empire and empiric ways of worlding. This presentation reflects on and analyses the project’s dramaturgical challenges and artistic research praxis. Further we explore the limits of historical contexts and legacies of disappearance which drive the research and analyse how the refraction processes of artistic research allows for indirect ways of looking so that difficult stories can still be experienced and remembered but which can refuse to offer sacrificial stories of pain which risk perpetuating harm on survivors and victims. We seek instead to understand the socio-political dramaturgies which drive disappearances and domination of certain narratives.