page_title: Hybrid Artworks
section_title: Incidental Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Hybrid Artworks / Incidental Legacy
caption_attribution_description: English: This is a still image from a Hybrid Artworks performance.
context_page_description: Hybrid Artworks is an interdisciplinary research and performance art cooperative originally based in Hull, UK. It was established in 1995 and produced pieces of performance art, video installation theatre, texts and essays.
context_section_description: Each of the projects realised by Hybrid Artworks were funded on a project-by-project basis by a series of Arts funding boards. Incidental Legacy was jointly funded with support from Hull Jazz Festival, 1998 and Lincolnshire and Humberside Arts. The second part of the overall project was funded as part of Hull Literature Festival. It was composed of three separate performances of the same basic script held in the same gallery space. The performances were spread out over a one-year period. It was based on the interplay of three principal components: i) the script and its performance, ii), the gallery space and its plan layout and iii) a multitude of recorded material of which film was of central importance.  The key theoretical texts identified by Hybrid Artworks as underlying this piece were those of Umberto Eco.
  The "script" was conceived as a series of independent but interrelated poems written for two voices. Read in an alternating sequence by two actors, it was composed into what has been called a lineal narrative that deals with the ambiguous nature of memory. Following this script, the two actors continually repeated and re-used the same words and images in different contexts. Continuously placing the events retold in conflicting and contradictory perspectives, this narrative strategy was intended to instigate multiple different interpretations of the same basic text. 
  The fragmentary and semi post-structural logic behind this narrative structure was repeated in the treatment of the gallery space used. In this case, The European Illustration Collection Gallery, Kingston upon Hull. The way in which screens, seating, projected images and actor positions were organised in gallery space was intended to ensure that multiple and different associations between text, action and image were continually elicited. The intention behind this has been explained as "making space active in plot construction".
  Initially the projections used in the piece were standard photographic or filmic images cast onto walls or independent partitioning screens. As the piece developed, however, the intention was to use projected filmic imagery to manipulate the “perceptual experience of the space”. Employing a technique of filming images in the space and then re-projecting those same images back into the space, the effect has been called “the blurring of our understanding of the physical and the mediated”.
  Shadows: Performed initially as part of a music festival in August 1998, Shadows was the first of the three performances that made up the entire Incidental Legacy project. In this piece the audience was seated and the actors were free to move around the gallery setting. The video projection was composed of material filmed during the rehearsals and, thus, presented the audience with images of the actors practising their dialogue in the gallery itself.
  Memories: The second performance of the project was performed some months after the first one and formed part of an annual literature festival. It differed from its predecessor in two principal ways. Firstly, the seating was completely removed from the gallery and the actors were generally restricted to set corners of the space; an arrangement that allowed the audience to move completely freely around the gallery. Secondly, there was a greater use of videoed material as filmed images of Performance 1, Shadows, were projected during this second presentation. The result was described as twofold; the piece was interpreted more as performance art than standard theatre and its narrative reading became more complex as more visual references were overlaid.
  Echoes: The final “performance” involved the complete elimination of live acting and relied totally on the pre-recorded material accumulated throughout the previous performances. Given this independence from physical action, it represented the culmination of a project that had moved from the realm of theatre, passed through the field of performance art, and finally positioned itself completely within the theoretical framework of video installation. It wa
caption: Still image from Experimentations in Space-a documentary film
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