Peter Olivier

VIRTUAL TOUR

ARTIST CATALOGUE

Always in Rehearsal

My practice unfolds through rehearsal—a continual retuning of how I understand gesture, image, and encounter. Moving between the screen, the page, and the stage, I treat the theatre as my site and my framework for making; an active and provisional space for shared invention wherein gesture becomes language, play becomes learning, and image-making becomes a meeting between selves and histories.

Much of my work takes place beneath the long shadow of the twentieth century, a time whose aesthetics and anxieties echo on through the present. I am drawn to its peculiar extremities: the angular theatrics of German Expressionist cinema, the ghastly excesses of decadence, and the solitary figure at the centre of both—the modern self turned spectacle. I restage and toy with these inheritances — aesthetic or otherwise—and postures of power through exaggeration, irreverence, and embodied play, tracing how individualism and selfreflexivity persist in contemporary image-making.

A pivotal shift in my understanding of theatre and theatre-making occurred halfway through the making of this presentation. This shift is marked by a boundary between a previously solitary, image-driven pursuit—signified by the “backstage” of this travelling production — and a more recent, collaborative, ensemble approach—signified by the “frontstage”. This shift came about when discovering Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed (1974); a framework for applied theatre which proposes the notion of the “spect-actor”: the spectator turned actor. In light of this ethos, collaboration has come to form the pulse of my practice. In this, personal memory and improvisation feed the collective composition of images and tableaux; the exercises in gesture and play behind the image-worlds and scenes in question have primarily to do with temper tantrums and grimaces. They recall the unselfconscious performances of childhood — moments where expression exceeds decorum. I return to them for their unruly vitality and for the sense of release and absurd clarity they afford in a world that prizes composure.