Performance Art by Karla Ptacek | Art Exhibition

Playing Games
I taught a group of Nepalese children an English song and movement game – the ‘Hokey Cokey” – partly because I thought some of the English words for bodyparts might prove useful to them, but mainly because game-playing was a language we shared. Everywhere in Nepal I saw versions of games that I remembered from childhood in England: hopscotch, spinning tops, jacks, hoola hoop, cricket and fives. Like us, they used sticks, stones, string and makeshift bats & balls.
So 5 months later when I was seeking some small act of closure for the performative part of the festival, I chose ‘Pillo’, a game learnt in the courtyard of a Buddhist monastery in Jharkot. There, it had been played against a backdrop of soaring mountains, in fading light and under falling snow. In Lyme Regis we played Pillo on a sandy beach besides the English Channel, beneath ashen skies. In both places, the game-playing connected us, in a kind of ‘puja’ of play.

The Erosion Project
The Erosion Project is a form of ‘epistolary performance’ that occurs between an English director and a Nepali playwright that arose out of serendipitous events and through a series of 13 emails and an article in The Kathmandu Post.

Something Told
SOMETHING TOLD is a series of autobiographical stories that emerged out of identical acting workshops I taught at Theatre Village in Kathmandu and at Woodroffe Secondary school in Lyme Regis.
The aim was to find intercultural connections via storytelling in the belief that it is through the profoundly personal that we see through surface characteristics to the universal.

Skyping With Nepal
It’s 6pm in Dorset: Andrew Dickson & musicians are ready to perform for the opening night ArtsFest audience in Lyme Regis. I relay their performance via Skype to the Nepali performers watching and waiting in Theatre Village, Kathmandu. In Nepal its 11:45pm: after Andrew, Rojita and her musicians are due to perform traditional Buddhist music, “Gunla Baja.” Elsewhere, Gunjan Dixit waits to perform at her laptop, running llines from “At the Teashop” by Nepali poet, Keshab Sigdel.
This then is Skyping with Nepal – a live, collaborative opportunity to exchange music and poetry between artists in Nepal & Dorset, and comes with a high degree of built-in failure. Skype performances rely on a combination of text-chat, sound, video and still images in a data flow that is often fragmented and intermittent. It is a mode that opens a risky space within the performance event. My hope is for a sense of being present to one another, in a small, shared, digital space, across great distances.

Viaduct 290913
6 hours of trekking through the Khubra Pass, with no sign of human or animal life, I notice a tiny shape on the ridge below the skyline begin a slow rotation, followed by a procession of black dots: a goatherd and his flock. The vastness and scale of the mountains in Nepal becomes more comprehensible only through this faint movement in time. VIADUCT 290913 was a performance in the English countryside that tried to capture, in a playful way, this sense of scale and perception.
Procedure: One at a time, audience members were given 60 seconds to look through a telescope pointed at the Cannington Viaduct in Uplyme, Dorset. Earphones were worn that played an audio recording I’d made of a group of elderly Mustang women, engaged in a fierce debate as they cut and cleared bracken outside their village. After the allotted 1 minute was up, the viewer was asked to make a drawing of what they had seen through the telescope.
Materials: 19th century stone Viaduct; picturesque English valley, machete, umbrella, rope, ladder, headphones, sound recording, telescope, viewing platform, human being.
* film of Viaduct 290913 is still in progress

The Grandfather’s Tale
Woodroffe school drama student, Miles Ford, performed an excerpt from a contemporary Nepali play, “A Grandfather’s Tale’ written by Khagendra Lamichhane. This excerpt was translated into English especially for us by Jeebesh Rayamajhi of Theatre Village, Kathmandu. The performance closed our website launch and fundraiser held at Marine Theatre, Lyme Regis, on December 8th 2013.

PerformanceKarla Ptacek