project image
Caroline Picard
INTERFERENCE

first performed on December 5, 2015
Sector 2337, Chicago, IL
performed once in 2015

PATRICK DURGIN

Brian Hochberger, William Smart

Chicago, IL

INTERFERENCE
PATRICK DURGIN

I wanted to emulate the distancing effects developed by Scott Burton in his “Behavior Tableaux” and also to retain his focus on task-based, non-acting. I wrote the script for “Interference” as an extension of my book PQRS which is a poet’s theater script meant to be sufficient as a reading experience. It is a book that is impossible to produce as a drama, and that impossibility is its poetry, and its poetry is a sort of essay. “Interference” was beamed down from the top floor of the building into the gallery and shown on a cell phone screen clipped to the wall. After carefully blocking and framing the action with Brian and Willy, we sent it down through Periscope, a live broadcasting app. The tension between acting and non-acting was supposed to be congruent with the possibility of missing the fact that a performance was happening, coupled with the potential to catch the live feed on your cell phone without the context of the Festival of Poets Theater, the event hosting the performance at Sector 2337.