Run Rabbit Run

Photograph of 'running rabbit' in Simon's hand.

For those of you who haven't been here at the Fremantle Arts Centre over the past ten days you may be wondering what rabbits have to do with anything.

Look closely at the photograph.

Yes, that is a rabbit running on the palm of Simon's hand.

But why?

You may recall my intention not to use the PNG material in order to focus the support material on the development of methodology rather than the creation of a work? Well, the running bunny was once a thirty-second third-year student film - and a relatively random addition to the project.

I wasn't completely convinced by the material at first. I like that it was simple and clear, however, I was worried we wouldn't be able to link it content-wise to the performance and architecture aspects of the exploration.

After racking my brain between Sunday and Tuesday last week I realised our running rabbit was stuck. Going nowhere. Stuck inside a frame. Camera travels, rabbit does not. Generally speaking.

Coincidentally (or perhaps not), in Canberra (December) Adelina, Dan and I had been working with 'stuck' as a 'score'. We found that placing ourselves in an every-day 'pose' or position and then negotiating how to more ourselves 'stuck' led not to the person doing the score looking stuck but instead having an increased human-ness. 

The detail of movements became more apparent as did the architecture of the building we were doing the research. The senses of both the 'performer' and 'witness' became heightened.

Reintroducing the 'stuck' score into the process worked on a number of levels. While I still think the rabbit material remains fairly arbitrary (and not very meaningful), when we worked with some local artists (dancers, performers and visual artists) here at the Arts Centre we were able to integrate everyone into the process and the architectural/projection environments as well as conceptually link their improvisations through working with this score.