Dust Covers Performance Maps
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Title
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Dust Covers Performance Maps
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Description
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Norman Price, the director and writer of a play called Dust Covers, asked the two performers (Michele Finnegan playing “X” and Catherine Milne playing “Y”) to write an account of their individual performance, and the two were included as an appendix in the Master’s thesis he wrote on the genesis of the work (Price 1989). A sample page from each “score” is reproduced in [the figures], with the kind permission of the authors. Catherine Milne calls the account a “map” and sees it as made up of the “lines of their journey.” These spatial metaphors are highly pertinent, for the actors present in schematic form their movements within the presentational space as well as a shorthand indication of their major actions, gestures, and the stages of the emotional experience they go through each time they perform the work.
As demonstrated in the sample page reproduced in [the figure], Michele Finnegan’s very systematic account is arranged as a series of numbered “Points,” each of which is segmented into a further series of numbered units. Her moves within the rectangular presentational space are noted, together with directional arrows and her stopping points. The term point that she uses to refer to the first level of performance segmentation is interesting in that in its normal usage it can refer both to position in space and the abstract level of ideas.…
The account by Catherine Milne is set out in a similar way with diagrams mapping the moves and a written account of the content, physical and emotional, of each of the numbered stages in her dramatic progression. Both actors adopt a two-level system of performance notation but the way they conceive the component parts is slightly different. Milne does not use the term “point” and her macro level is indicated simply by the numbered series of diagrams. She has eighteen of these, while Finnegan's performance consisted of ten Points, and Milne numbers her sub-units consecutively for the whole performance (forty in all) while Finnegan begins the numbering afresh each time.
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Designer
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Finnegan, Michele; Milne, Catherine
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Date
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1989
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Source
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Dust Covers
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Bibliographic Citation
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McAuley, Gay. 1999. Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the Theatre. University of Michigan Press. Page 136.
