Installation element, Three Duets (2003)
THREE DUETS
(2003)
Performance • Video • Intergenerational • Disability‘The most ‘entertaining’ installation I have seen in a while’
- Live Art Magazine
Three Duets is a three channel video installation with sound and objects, made for gallery spaces. Robert performs three duets, one each with Sheila Ghelani, Juliet Robson and Angela Rodaway. The work is a game of looking, challenging assumptions around difference and subtly musing on life, death, sex and transformation.
Also placed in the installation space is a vintage puppet theatre, standing on a plinth and acting as a key to other aspects of the work. The puppet theatre was given to Robert by artist and curator Simon Costin, who bought it in Prague. Inside this little gifted facade stands a plastic house, illuminated from the inside and placed on a square of fake grass. A makeshift haunted rendering of ‘home’ as somewhere we hope might keep us safe.
SHEILA
With Sheila the pair enact a series of rituals in adjacent identical hallways, seemingly suspended somewhere between the institutional and the intimate. They sit naked and stare at the walls. Two minds unfolding. They each imagine performing a series of acts – strings of seemingly random thoughts becoming choreographies, as if each trying to trick their way out of an unbearable wait in a hospital corridor.
JULIET
Juliet and Robert appear as nine different pairings, in a series of static outdoor shots to camera. Dressed in a variety of stylised costumes they present themselves in ways which may lead a viewer to assume they are a couple. Juliet is always seated in a large 1970’s wicker chair, Robert is always stood next to her, his feet obscured from view. These tableaux are gently subversive – they belie truths about the physical, sexual and gender identities of each performer. What appear as family portraits are culturally coded statements about power, gender and ableism.
ANGELA
The third duet presents fragments of story and memory, shared with Robert by octogenarian Angela Rodaway, as text. Working from audio recordings of their conversations, Angela’s narrative is presented a single written word at a time, changing in synch with her original speech pattern. This embodying of tales through the (re)presentation of text is a deliberate attempt to describe a friendship that exists between this younger man and older woman, based not on difference but on shared politics, activism and belief. Stripping Angela’s physicality from this text presents viewers with a narrative free from the associations she felt were imposed upon her as an older woman. But to counter any sense of erasure, a portrait of her staring directly to camera fills the screen for the last moments of each film cycle.
Robert in Three Duets (2003), video still
Robert and Sheila in Three Duets (2003), video still
Sheila in Three Duets (2003), video still
Robert and Juliet as ‘Tony & Yvonne’ in Three Duets (2003), video still
Robert and Juliet as ‘Ray & Bernadette’ in Three Duets (2003), video still
Angela's words - 'Homunculus' Three Duets (2003), video still
Angela's words - 'Suffragettes' Three Duets (2003), video still
Angela in Three Duets (2003), video still
CREDITS
Premiere: 1 February, 2003
Place: Gallery 1, Arnolfini , Bristol
Duration: 30 minutes, looped
Concept and direction: Robert Pacitti
Co-devisor and performer: Angela Rodaway
Co-devisor and performer: Juliet Robson
Co-devisor and performer: Sheila Ghelani
Camera, sound, editing, objects: Robert Pacitti
Camera and audio support: Michael White
Producer: Pacitti Company
Context: Commissioned by Helen Cole for Inbetween Time Festival, 2003 .
Funding: An Arnolfini Breathing Space Commission
Showings included: Arnolfini. Bristol (2003); Castlefield Gallery, Manchester (2003); Soho Theatre, London (2007)
Special thanks to: Helen Cole and Inbetween Time Festival