What happens when we feed a system that is completely ambivalent to our own needs? How do we show the exhausted body, the anxious body? When one system takes from another, grows larger, accumulates space and ultimately forms through the collapse of my own body what does that look like? What is the narrative of the “hero” or the “player” when the game has no clear sense or stakes? Goliath is an exploration of these questions and a series of verbs I have been re-defining within my own practice. Inflating, pumping, breathing and performing. The piece is structured in two parts: the first section inflating while the second an unreadable, practically impossible “game” to knock the object out of the sky.

Goliath has an aesthetic feel of something between a Cronenberg movie, Greek sculpture, and clunky apocalyptic athleticism.

Over time I have begun to structure my practice through different verbs I seem to gravitate towards while designing performances. Inflation, or the cycle of air between myself and another object is a subject that I have revisited countless times in my durational work. Through multiple performances exploring this verb I discovered that what became interesting to me was not the end product of the “inflated object” but instead the state of inflating. The capture of measured time, the exhausted body either giving air or having air taken from it. I began to create my own dialogue around a half inflated object, finding that it lives in an in-between space, or “uncanny reality”. Through this realization I have begun to create performances that showcase this middle state. I want the viewer to be aware of air being held in, the struggle of material and the release of my own breath. The time it takes to reach its end point in either direction before starting all over again. For me inflation is this “breathing” or record of time. Goliath would be the culmination of four performance experiments that have lead me to these definitions.

The second act of each performance (which I have referred to as the “game portion”) is set up to investigate the role of my body and the object once they are detached. In my work I have explored a giving role between performer and object but in Goliath I want to try and demonstrate a system that is taking something from me. I want the audience to feel exhausted while watching me. I want them to feel as though I will never succeed, because I want them to redefine what winning in this work really means. If an action has no anticipation of ending how do we interpret the rules to the game?