Part performance, part conversation, part installation. Walking into ‘Table of Contents’ at the ICA felt like arriving at a workshop that had already started. A large wooden table takes up a corner of the space. Chairs are scattered around.

“Feel fee to take a chair and move around the space” Matthias Sperling says. It’s a performance installation involving 6 artists. Somehow Matthias appears to have it all in control, offering suggestions and explanations as a mostly silent group of viewers look on. Matthias explains that their aim was to create a dance installation that could be sustained for the length of the gallery opening hours. The work has a pleasing structure. Every twenty minutes or so we gather around the table and the artists explain what they are going to do for the coming twenty minutes. They use chalk to mark out the room on the surface of the table itself, drawing and labelling the sections, stating what space they will perform the section in, inviting the viewers’ questions. Then they proceed to ‘perform’ the snippets of material in the spaces they have agreed on.

“Feel free to take a chair and move around the space” Matthias tells us. Some times the ‘performance material’ is performed by just one artist, sometimes two, sometimes they all get involved. Matthias starts his solo with “I wonder if the best thing to do right now is a section from Siobhan Davies Archive, Wyoming, Lauren Potter’s material” and then he proceeds to perform the short snippet followed by “I wonder if the best thing to do right now is a section from White Man Sleeps from the Siobhan Davies Archive, Gill Clarke’s material.” Followed by another snippet. The material continues to unfold, with Sperling’s description of the name of the work, the performer who originated the material, and the date (which I omitted because I don’t have his memory!) creating a reassuringly comforting refrain to the performance. Charlie Morrissey and Andrea Buckley then perform a contact duet in which Charlie describes how Andrea is performing a public dissection of his heart, “anyone who’s squeamish should look away now” he says as they move into a lift and roll away from each other. “I trust that Andrea knows what she’s doing, although she tells me that she learnt how to do it from internet videos”. The audience laughs.

Another break, the table is shifted to a different corner of the space and “Feel free to take a chair and move around the space” Matthias tells us. A duet between Matthias Sperling and Helka Kaski, ‘Install’ takes up a small corner at the far end of the space. Step 1: Install – The performers carry out a circular movement going from standing to the floor. In further steps 2 and 3 (I think but may have added one here) they discuss the movement material which came from footage on the Siobhan Davies Archive, of Henry Montes performing this small section. “He only performed it once in the whole piece” says Sperling. But the two performers repeat the movement over and over, conversing all the while on details of the movement, what they are thinking whilst doing it over and over again, “Preferably” says Kaski “something interesting”. Final Step: Uninstall – The performers stop “thank you” they say.

The work has the feel of a relaxed sharing, or lecture demonstration, an exposition of the thoughts and ideas that inform a performer’s process. The performers move around the space and talk to each other or greet friends and associates in the audience. They refer to each other by first names although, endearingly, Siobhan Davies is “Siobhan Davies”. The Siobhan Davies Archive is heavily referenced, but is not the only material. Each performance snippet has a reassuringly clean structure. It’s as though you’re watching a performance with the programme notes running along-side it, revealing the underlying thinking and rationale for the work, the internal chatter worn on the outside. I remember one theatre producer telling me that he never reads programme notes because a piece of dance work really should speak for itself. I think that what this work achieves in revealing the thought processes within the material itself, is how much more depth there is in material when we acknowledge the presence of thought in performance.

‘Manual’: each performer asks a member of the audience to give them movement instructions that will bring them from lying on the floor to standing. “Move your right elbow towards your left ear and swing your head to your left…now bring your left knee up to your stomach…” it takes a good 10-15 minutes and still some find that their mover is no further from the ground than they were to begin with. The audience is less silent now, people move around, converse, speak to the performers. “Let’s gather round the table again. Feel free to move the chairs around” Matthias tells us. I leave.

‘Table of Contents’ is on at the ICA, London till the 19th January. Entrance is free. Go and see!

It’s a strange business this ‘artist’s life’. We spend 95% of our time working towards something: pinning down our ideas, writing endless applications that prove that we know what we want to do enough to know that we can do it, but not so much as to remove the all important ‘risk’ without which, apparently, good art cannot possibly emerge. You send your thoughts ‘out there’, receive a yes (if you’re lucky) and jump for joy before crashing out exhausted and daunted by the reality of the situation you are now in: for all those times that you shouted in frustration about “not being given a bloody chance”, now here you are and, I’m afraid, here it is.

You’d think that receiving any substantial support might be just the kind of affirmation you needed. Finally you enter the sublime experience which is the 5%: making new work. Here I am, earning actual money in return for my creative work. I’m a ‘real’ artist, turning up to ‘work’ in the studio. Isn’t this what I’ve always wanted? But still, the world is intent on putting you in your place. Here’s how it went for me:

The first ‘sharing’ of the work in progress, two weeks into the project: I got cold feet, wasn’t sure I wanted anyone to see it, and then got a little upset when no one bothered anyhow.

Week three: we travel to Bedford and find that our studio is full of children on summer camp. A few phonecalls and one frantic staff member later, we have a space. Crisis averted. Phew. We head to our hotel later that day (travelodge in case you wondered) and “no, we don’t have a reservation for you.” Cue: walking an hour to the OTHER END of Bedford and back EVERYDAY because I mistakenly booked the wrong hotel. Oops.

Week four: I turn up in Lancaster and endure the very humbling experience of having to explain to the ‘lady in charge of the keys’ a.) who I am and b.) what I’m doing there. Very good questions, I thought privately.

Things finally began to pick up for us in week five. We worked at Jerwood Space, rubbing shoulders with Tori Amos and David Walliams in the green room, feeling smug and oh so professional….just the small issue of having no time left to finish the piece….

And that was just the practical stuff. There is always a point, about midway along where I realise that I may have bitten off more than I can chew. Actually the knowledge is always there, it’s just that at some stage I have to confront it. Now sometimes, as in this case, all that was needed was for a practical re-evaluation of my project outcomes and some decisive action on this front would have been handy. But instead this was the exact moment when I decided to have a bit of a break down. Confidence plummeted, and with no one around to scrape me off the ground, I slowly began to unravel.

There was a game we used to play as children, skimming pebbles across the sea. You had to find a pebble that had the right kind of flatness to it and you threw it side ways so that it skimmed the water’s surface. If you threw it wrongly it would just plonk into the sea. If you threw a ‘good one’ it could skim the surface up to three of four times before running out of speed and sinking. I think putting an idea out there is a bit like throwing a skimming pebble, once it leaves your hand, you have no more control. You can only trust that you’ve given it the right kind of guidance to keep it moving . In my case the problem wasn’t that the idea was sinking, it was that it was moving on a course that I had no control over. I had an idea and set it in motion. Somewhere along the line I took a turning that was absolutely the right turning to take, but as the journey continued, I realised, that I was going somewhere that was new to me. There was absolutely no question of steering it back. This piece was somehow making itself. At the end of it all the resounding feeling was that ‘I’ was not in it….

This was where I was at when I arrived in Lancaster in week 4, with my mini identity crisis in hand and my confidence at rock bottom. At this point I was supposed to have completed part 1 and should have been ready to start part 2. The former had clearly not happened, but the latter still had to regardless. There was a shift in energy and focus as I began to work with another collaborator. Three days into this collaboration it became obvious to me that the mix was not right. I’m baffled by what exactly went wrong. But I feel that there was a clue to this in a conversation I had with my collaborator on the evening of her arrival. We were sitting in a cafe eating the only palatable food on the menu (no wonder students put on weight when all they eat is pizza and chips), when the discussion turned to Malta – the country I grew up in and still associate myself with, being still a ‘Maltese’ national. My collaborator had just returned from a holiday there and explained to me how she found the Maltese conservatism was a superficial guise for the reality which was quite different. For example, top-less bathing is against the law, but then everyone leads hugely hedonistic lives with couple swapping and orgies, apparently a norm. She seemed to assume such an air of authority that it took some strength of will to say: now just a moment, I grew up there, and unless I’m terribly mistaken my parents don’t couple swap!!!!!! and the people camping in the free camping zone on Comino are not exactly reflective of the average Maltese. Now here’s the thing. What do you do if you’re about to start working artistically with someone who appears to over generalise and has a very assertive sense of what she knows, even when she doesn’t know?

I left Lancaster with part 2 in disarray, but as they say: lots of lessons learnt. Returning to London where I could focus on completing the project in the comfort of my home town was such a relief. I felt as though I’d emerged from a very dark room and I was starting to find my feet again. A week later I was plunged back into my teaching work, back to routine and classes and the see-saw of applications and rejections, elation, self-confidence crashes, crises and resolutions. Welcome back to the 95%. The only question is: “Now….where am I?”

Come and see “Where am I?” at the Giant Olive Theatre, 27th and 28th September