Associate Projects - Hugo Glendinning Update 1

There are things I saw while watching Paul-André for the first time on his third day of 30x30, there were also things I felt I saw but it wasn’t until I had seen my photographs a few hours later that I realised there is something magical going on under the Liverpool Street clock, outside McDonalds, this month.

A man in black stands within a feeble ring of string, the work unfolds slowly, Paul-André prowls a bit like a boxer with no opponent, then there is a transformation and he engages with the people around the performance space, and he becomes visible – there he is, hypnotist, shamen, conductor, dancer. As I watch I see how people in the street, people going about their quotidian lives, become an audience, an audience which moves and mutates like a cloud around the performance, it has no fixed edges as people themselves engage and disengage with the show.

This is how it feels when I watch Paul-André, but when I later see the photos I took, just snaps, a kind of note taking of the performance and the architecture that contains it, I see something very different and revealing. Both those who stop to watch, or is it “look” - like at a car crash and not theatre - and those who glance as they pass become drawn into the choreography. They become dancers in Paul-André's choreography, they are the choreography – in the photos I see hands flexed and bodies shaped in echoes and tangents to Paul-André's movements. Some of this must be calculated from within the work that Paul-André presents here, he knows what people will do, but much of it looks like response to me. I’m not sure what this means, maybe that people want to join in, to be with him in that very human way - to help the one outside the group. Or maybe they want to be with him because he seems to know something that they don’t, he seems to understand the world as an artist and they have the need to follow him. After the first edit of my photographic notes I make a mental note that for the next month I will be trying to photograph subliminal choreography.