Wood, Nick and Sitaropoulou, Maria-Eleni (2023) Drawing as Devising: ‘In Time’ - Marking Time Through Drawing in Performance. In: Drawing and Performance: Creating Scenography. INET-md Dance Studies Group, Coimbra, pp. 23-46. ISBN 9789727352753

Abstract

With ‘In Time’ - an improvised performance including Movement (Maria-Eleni Sitaropoulou), Music (Calum Lynn) and Drawing (Nick Wood) – we initially set out to create a short performance for the Global Improvisation Initiative at Middlesex University (2019), foregrounding the element of improvisation through the inclusion of live drawing. As John Berger writes in Bento’s Sketchbook: ‘When I’m drawing – and here drawing is very different from writing or reasoning – I have the impression at certain moments of participating in something like a visceral function, such as digestion or sweating, a function that is independent of the conscious will. This impression is exaggerated, but the practice or pursuit of
drawing touches, or is touched by, something prototypical. ’This description of drawing not only underlines its capability of introducing an element which is unplanned or unpredictable,
but also introduces its possible physical and bodily nature, further linking the activity of drawing with the subject of this work. Taking our performance of ‘Present Time’ as an example, and mindful of Berger’s description, this paper will seek to consider the activity of drawing as improvisation, teasing out parallels between drawing and improvised performance and ways in which they may usefully interact. Following my recent practice of allowing an appropriate work of art to stimulate thinking, I will encounter the exhibition Marking Time: Process in Minimal Abstraction currently showing at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, before allowing a particular artwork in the exhibition to inspire the development of this
paper. This activity of free-writing will be accompanied by free-photography, and it is anticipated that the presentation of this paper will include those images alongside the artworks in the exhibition under consideration, and the thoughts and words which they offer and provide.