While tidying up, we found this document, dated October 2006.
It appears to be a short set of interview questions, the origin of which is obscure, but the chances are we copied them down from a real interview and had a go at inventing our own answers. It looks like Andrew D was the Five Andrew assigned to this task.
The answers still seem valid 14 years on.
We present the world premiere, we think, of “How do you define your work?”
- How do you define your work?
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By performing it.
- When does work stop being Dance and become Live Art?
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When kittens contracted for the chorus are forced to perform dangerous stunts while their chaperones are distracted.
- Who makes the categories and do they matter?
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The Five Andrews are difficult to categorise and that is fundamental to our identity and robust self-image.
In some of the texts which accompany our enactments The Five Andrews subverts the primacy of language by some device or other.
As performers, like many others, we operate within that civilising paradigm where humans can leave words behind.
Members of the public sit in large auditoria along with thousands of strangers. The curtain rises and each of us has a dream without words.
After the curtain has fallen those of us who have escaped beatification assume the role of vicars and preach the Word that came to us in our dream.
Given the propensity humans have to label things our agenda as artists should include forcing a crisis by inventing a multiplicity of sub genres to label what we do. Or, more lazily, borrow some from pop music. I fancy being Gorgeous Ambient.
Such a subterfuge would change the landscape of the problem around use of categories to manage expectation, appreciation and understanding.
A multiplicity of categories would be good for everyone except venues.
Why is an examination of liveness important in your work?
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So, that’s like examining being at work at work?
1. for the performer it's fun to work with the practical constraints and
2. for the audience authenticity is transparent and
3. liveness is only another medium with its own features and characteristics and
4. liveness suits our work because we use our bodies in time and space; it is these things that make up most of the content of what we do. Much of that could be almost as validly presented on video.
In 2006 The Five Andrews have got a lot on. Below is a flyer from our performance in Clerkenwell of The Garden of Wrong, first created for a brewery in Zurich.