Di Ball's Performance -Day 3 -#kipaf15

Di Ball is deeply superficial: Kolkatta style

Our identities are shaped by the stories we hear and tell about ourselves over time. While certain aspects of identity are fixed and unchangeable . our social identity is formed in relationship to others. They are produced in our encounters with other people and can be understood as forms of “everyday performances” or “masks” that we wear differently depending on who we are with and what we want to present about ourselves.

Spirit of Place (Genius Loci)  refers to a unique, distinctive and cherished aspects of a place....It is thus as This much in the invisible weave of culture as it is in the tangible physical aspects of place: a new layer of ley lines, feng shui, leftover spaces. This spirit reflects how a city functions in real time as people move through time and space.

This project weaves  notions of Place and Identity into a series of insertions in Kolkatta . They are both performative and the residue of performance. They seek to engage with the local and  in contrast with the “outsider”.

That outsider is ME. Di Ball. A large, old, Australian woman searching for her identity in this land.

I work with/inhaibit various personae which  act as filters for my past. They set up the instruments for my exploration and interrogation of identity.

And find no trace of identity
In this some supersensory radiance

What is that unknown around which this unknown (self) rotates in perpetual motion?
It’s as if the expanse of memory and forgetting, down the ages and far away
Make up its atmosphere
And get accumulated in different forms of history.

The “I” takes shape in its midst in the course of countless years.

Joy and Sorrow, good and ill, anger and envy, devotion friendship love -
with these are constituted its material body.

These are the ingredients - they are rotated, collected, danced.

The truth of their being
I myself haven’t understood.

Rabindranath Tagore (1938) Prashna (Question) Visra-Bharati Vol X11 p 135