My practice considers improvisation as an investigative action. At the heart of it doubt is the vector which comes closest to a sense of measurement or decision making. I approach each perfomance with a set of potentials which I have gathered or which have gathered around a subject or theme or site. Each of these potentials, a word, an idea, a piece of information, an object or an action has a certain strength or force and as they congregate together they link to each other in different ways, having lesser or greater gravity. Once a performance begins the doubt implicit in the act of improvising weighs the importance or effectiveness or pleasure in the potentials as they are used or as they push their way into the gaze of the performance. A decision made even at the start may negate most of the potentials of a performance but then such a schism will initiate its own direction and form for the rest of the improvisation.

At this stage before the performance of  ‘but the distance between’ I know I will write during the performance and make use of bodytracing. I know the site within the gallery in which the performance will take place and I have a strong sense of two of the main bodytrace forms that will appear. There is a mass of information due to the historical potential of the site but two main ideas relating to the bodytrace forms are dominant, in one case because of the previous inhabitants and uses of 5 Cavendish Row and secondly because of the particular material qualities of the site within the gallery in which I will perform and the gaze which is implicated in the body within that site. Experience of previous performances will have its influence in the run up and during the performance in the sense of an instinctive warning of dilemma arising rather than as an indication of right or wrong. The title has come out of a sequence of writing I did while visiting the site during the opening of the summer show and listening to talk about the history of the area. That writing’s initial question was about the problematic of responding  at all in any sort of open way to the myriad histories that cross each other in a major city where information piles up quicker than rubbish but it quickly resolved into a question about the difference between propagating life or death and the consideration that this might not be so clear.