Naomi Sex. DRILL

About

Working with both professional and non-actors, Sex has written and directed a series of scripted performances. These vignettes consider language, social interaction, absurdity and the limits of understanding. On the title, the artist writes:

In sport, the coach trains the team using a drill, honing movement and skills to muscle memory. Athletes repeat and perfect a sequence of actions that can be applied with high level efficiency on the track, in the field, on the court, in the arena, or in the pool. Knowing the drill, as a term, is more widely used to gain knowledge around a system and successfully navigating it. Doing a drill in an organised way prepares us for the unexpected, an emergency - leaving a building quickly or disembarking a plane if it crashes. Drilling down can be metaphorically applied as well as referring to an actual power drill.

DRILL comprises a series of monitors, speakers and projectors, which present each piece as distinct but interrelated episodes, linked to each other in an installation that places the viewer in the centre of the work. Scenes of dialogue, monologue, prop work, movement and sound move between screens, leading the viewer around the gallery and through the work. The individual pieces share a cast and the common setting of a multi-purpose gymnasium. Sports and training equipment such as resistance bands and weights appear repeatedly, used for their intended purpose and repurposed as accessories and clothing. The repetitive and circular actions of certain games – at one point badminton players fill the gallery, playing each other on different screens – are reflected in the character’s scripts, going back and forth in indecision and disagreement. These reflect the artist’s interest in the constructed nature of language and its ability to shape perception and experience. She writes:

The theory of language continues to remain a strong influence on the scripted material. The micro format of the scripts aims to distil focus and audience attention span. Theorists such as J.L. Austin, Judith Butler, Eve Sedgewick Kosofsky agree performative “speech acts” such as promises, apologies, dares or bequests have the capacity to shift realty. The classic example of this is the marriage declaration, “I hereby take you to be my…”. While Butler and Sedgewick detach it from Austin’s 1950s heteronormative context, both agree that a couple’s lives ultimately shift by publicly declaring this commitment to each other.

The inherent artificiality and strangeness of these speech acts combine with the repurposed and misused sports equipment, the limbo of the empty gym, and the efforts of the characters to make sense of it all, to know the drill.