As well as asking these sorts of questions, Gunn is forever working out how these sorts of things can be performed. But the questions come first. “I’m always burrowing down to core of what it is I’m trying to say; I can’t act, I can’t do anything until I’ve found that out, until I find out what it is I need to say. I keep researching. I spend a long time in a place of unknowing, it takes weeks and months. I’m in a whirlpool. It’s intense, and then it all funnels down, one day: ‘I’ve got it!’ My process is very methodical. I really do trust it. I’ve made enough shows now to know that I’m working 24 hours a day.”
Although Gunn reckons she’d be a nightmare for anyone else to work with, she is collaborating in this piece with choreographer/dancer Jo Lloyd and with sound designer and composer Kelly Ryall. “Jo Lloyd and I are both really into seeing where this collaboration can go,” she says. “She is remarkable. Someone described what we do together as ‘revolutionary’, which is probably a little bit exaggerated. But we’re onto something. In making this show we’re moving, talking, creating concepts, looking at unnecessary movement, and words, exhausting the language of movement.” Moving and talking on stage at the same time doesn’t come naturally to Gunn. “The performance challenge is to push myself. Making miniscule simple movements and talking at the same time is difficult for me. How do you do both at the same time? I don’t like to multi-task. I really haven’t got it yet. I’ve got my lines. But I can’t just do it while I brush my teeth: I have to concentrate.”
Gunn’s work appears random and spontaneous but it is actually carefully scripted. “The show has got structure, there are elements in place,” she continues. “We’re pacing the relationship between the text and Kelly’s music, which is all live. Actually we’re noodling and faffing. She’s noodling and I’m faffing. I have made the perfect show: highly structured noodling and faffing!”
With work addressing essentially philosophical and/or political concerns, the challenge for Gunn is to make her work entertaining and informative. So far so good, her work exhibits a singular and absurd humour, something inherent in her approach. “Piece for Person and Ghetto Blaster dips into a philosophical political area but it still has frivolity, it has the ludicrous aspect which is important,” she continues. “I have to stop myself making a philosophical lecture. The performance is unpacking in 72 minutes a ten minute exchange, a brief encounter I had with another human being, with a man and a duck, which troubled me so much. Not the way he acted but more the way I reacted. Why did I react the way I did? It was troubling; it made me look at myself. It’s a simple piece: ‘Let’s consider this moral conundrum. What would you do ln these circumstances?’ So I’ve made a whole show about what I did.” As ever with Gunn’s work we’re never quite sure what is fact and what is fiction, and you do wonder, especially with work so autobiographical. “I do seemingly reveal myself,” she adds. “People are seeing persona of myself. And it is also fiction. I make a body of work I’m interested in, that spans the intersection of art and politics, through art and everyday life.”
Although sometimes she worries that the world might have seen too many Nicola Gunn shows, there’s still a long way for Gunn to go in her intense and rigorous self-examination, and needless to say, she’s developed a philosophical take on the fact that she’s doing what she does. “It’s self-referential but I’m just brushing the surface. People might think I’m exploring the same territory, think I’m continuing to develop the same show. The 20 or so people who have seen every show I’ve done might start getting bored. But audiences don’t think I’m being narcissistic; they’re watching a process. It’s not what you do it’s how you do it, how you deliver – how you get it across. I have incredible self-doubt. What will people think? ‘Oh we’ve been seeing the same show for the last three years?’ But there are thousands of people who haven’t seen my work! I had a conversation with Russell Walsh and I said ‘maybe this is incomprehensible to audiences? He said ‘Who cares if it’s good? What do you think? Who cares if they like it, are you interested?’ Pearls of wisdom! Of course I care deeply. But there is more to life. Who cares if you hate this show? I don’t care – I’ll be dead in 50 years.”
BY LIZA DEZFOULI
