Strata / Performance

With documentary films, you usually work away in private. You show cuts to friends or family, and the film is described as working or not working: did people understand it as a successful communication? Conventionally, you do not show it publicly until the answer is yes.

Topography is also an exploration of method. We did not want the outcome to be the only part that was salient or valid; the method and form are part of the communication. So we asked: what would a transparent production look like? What if we did not wait until the end for it to be presentable? Could it become a dialogue with audiences?

The frame is fixed before we begin: where Hannah and I sit, the video-mixer setup, stereo calibration, a loose opening sequence, and the end credits. The opening tends to begin with an abstracted landscape and introduce one element at a time. Everything in the middle is malleable. After several performances, a rough arc has developed, but it is closer to an improviser's unspoken agreement than a score.

There is something fundamentally different about being in the room together. Everyone has made some investment in being present, and the work carries a small amount of social risk. On one level, it is a very safe version of a tightrope walk: the audience is watching us make something singular that will only happen that day. Repeating the performance also teaches us which styles, aesthetics, and editorial techniques continue to work across different improvisations. That information feeds back into the film edit.

The voices in the landscape run on spatial loops of different lengths. They start somewhat at random, so I do not really control where people are or how their voices will intersect. I am almost blindfolded, moving through the terrain and listening for something. A voice or theme surfaces. Hannah hears a point of departure, cuts away from the landscape, and builds a segment in response. When it has run its course, we return to the landscape and start again.

We are onstage, miked, and talking to each other while we work, including coordinating and sometimes disagreeing. It is a performance of the editing room. After fifty minutes or an hour, when it feels time to wind down, we end and open a conversation with the audience. This is not a feedback session attached to the performance. It is part of the performance: people verbalize what they encountered and synthesize it for themselves and each other.

One audience member changed the piece by saying they were interested in what Hannah and I were saying to one another and wished they could hear it. We added microphones and have used them ever since. Hannah's voice comes from the left and mine from the right, in the same stereo mix as the voices inside the landscape.