What is a commission?

A commission is a strategy; an invite for an artist/artists to bring something into a space, whether that be open air, in an educational setting or indeed, like myself and Paul, a black-box studio.  A commission is a way of creating a work, in conversation with a set of rules, conceptual and contextual frameworks, and often as a response to an existing space, such as an art gallery, or an existing piece of dramatic text. A commission is a call for any art, from the visual to the vocal, from dance to theatre, a commission is a tool that artistic spaces/festivals/artists looking to collaborate use to make new work, or to re-stage, and re-work existing acts.

We were commissioned by tutor David Richmond, to create a studio-based performance, using an existing script as the stimulus, as research material and ultimately the show.

Throughout the course of this commission I collaborated with fellow student and artist Paul Murtough, to create, research, develop, enhance and support each other through the creative processes of a commission. We performed as one another, the self, the other, Horst and Max, as lovers, as humans, as gay men, as disabled men. As those who  give voice to those who have been oppressed and continue to be oppressed, something centric to our artistic practice. 

As we were utilising an existing dramatic text, we needed to layer it with autobiography, images from our own memory, placing our own writing within the context of Martin Sherman’s Bent, which was the play text we performed scenes intertwined with our autobiographical material.

Bent, is  a play written about two gay men, Max and Horst, set in the Holocaust in Dachau, a concentration camp in Southern Germany.  As a gay man myself it is a subject that is connected to myself, so it was vital to set a distance between myself and my character, Horst, and myself and the material whether Sherman’s, or myself and Pauls. This distance was set to prevent us becoming ‘stuck’ within ourselves, and to create material that would have an essence of Paul and I, without being explicitly about us. 

Paul, who suffers from Relapsing/Remitting Multiple Sclerosis, brought research centred  around the ‘crip’, and what ‘cripping’  the script and our material would do. Naturally, my research was centred around queering the play, through action, reaction, movement, speech, voice, set, staging, lighting and imagery. The paths of queering and cripping crossed numerous times during the process- and more often than not the queering of material was also cripping it- it was disabling what it was originally and modifying it so it no longer fits what the original frame was, but it still fits within the frame of difference, acceptance, sexuality, disability, body, love, and being human.