Drinking Tea
Auckland, 2015
In Drinking Tea, I invited 35 participants to a semi-public space. They could attend at any time during a six-hour period, and stay for as long as they wanted to. I remained silent for the entire duration of the performance, and asked that my guests refrained from using words or their voice, to not read or write, and to stay with it for as long as they ‘liked’. The purpose of this work was to test several aspects of extended duration silent performance. Firstly, with recent ethics approval I needed to test how the demands of the AUTEC institutional forms, which required participants to sign off, would affect the flow of the work (given the ambiguous nature of the inside and outside borders of performance proper). Second, my desire was to explore and experience how an everyday act (such as drinking tea) could be affected by the condition of silence. Twenty-one guests joined me for tea drinking, with each staying for longer than I had really anticipated, amounting to an average of twenty minutes each. Of those who responded to the survey offered after attendance, participants shared that the silence made them more aware of the ambient sounds, colours, shapes and textures in the environment, noticing details that they thought they might not have otherwise.
“I liked this morning. ‘Non-participating’ people go silent in the presence of silence, becoming participants. Fascinating. I had so many words, but with no means to communicate it was a peculiar feeling. The longer I was in silence, the more comfortable I became.”
“Silence is a framework for repose but it is also provides solace. It is also a mode of being, one where I can reflect and sometimes just be.”
The beauty to come from some of the comments affirmed the power of silence as a mode of porosity with respect to the community of participation. That is, those who are passing by, i.e. ‘non-participants’ became part of the work, contributing to the larger aura of silence at work in belonging. The inside and outside of the performance proper became deconstructed quite successfully. However, it also showed the power play at work of performance as a space to be ‘respected’ —like walking into a church as a tourist that does not belong to the congregation or denomination, yet keeps silent with the everyday community. The notion of tourism is at play in the above ‘non-participant’ quote that furthers the considerations of this project. The second quote above reflects a space for letting be —and this response aligns convincingly with the non-mastery of Being as a gift that just arrives without mastery, and to which Heidegger gives the term Gelassenheit (please refer back to my rationale in relation to the significance of the ‘essential solitude’ concept whereby both Heidegger and Blanchot speak of the non-mastery and poetic call of being as that affecting force of being in the world without separation in the silencing of the multiple instrumental voices that urge on progressive thinking. Both quotes also suggest they are still located within an ‘I’ of subjective interiority. There is no mention of what it felt like to be with the ‘other’ (myself, performer), albeit the non-human attributes are present, such as the noise of the surrounding space.