Working through collaborative performance pieces, and more recently through the making of a film, Peter Reder’s interest lies in investigating the ways in which cities become transformed through time, and how attachments, memories and identities are intrinsically bound up with a sense of place. Focusing on the intersections between private and public space, and individual and collective histories, his process is inherently dialogic.

Blurring the boundaries between performance and installation, City of Dreams is a collaborative work which has evolved and changed through time as it has been realised in different locations. Central to the work is a meditation on the history and atmosphere of a particular city, and the mapping of its moods and textures through the placing of found and personal objects, the sampling of sounds and the initiation of exchange and conversation. First created in 1994 in a tiny classroom in a south London college as a means of engaging students in a reflection on their relationship to the city around them, City of Dreams has since been performed in various London venues (including the South London Gallery and the National Theatre Studio) and has travelled to Germany and Singapore.

Each production has taken on a different character depending on the cast and the objects they choose to work with, and while retaining an element of control Reder allows the piece to evolve as a fluid and multi-layered dialogue. In Singapore he collaborated with sound artist Tom Wallis and worked with a group of students to create a transitional dreamland and soundscape made up of delicate memories and forgotten objects, and described the rehearsal process as an act of friendship and understanding. The audience, too, is invited into the dialogue. In a production of the work in London, the Thames was represented by a river of filled wine glasses flowing across the space, and as the performance finished cast members and audience took a glass in an act of shared celebration.

Reder’s interest in how a sense of place intertwines with memory and identity is reflected in a more intimate way in his recent film Re-Visit (2001), which explores his parents’ relationship to Toynbee Hall in east London. Having begun by exploring the history of Toynbee Hall as an institution, he became far more interested in his parents’ relationship to it (they had both attended evening classes there) and in making the piece they returned to the Hall for the first time in fifty years. Evoking a sense of magic and wonder, the artist captures the unexpected and the unexplainable as his mother dances spontaneously on the stage. In a space lit by torches, the film was projected onto the curtain in the Curtain Theatre at Toynbee suggesting another level of transformation through time and a public staging of an intimate private encounter.

Rohini Malik Okon

from ‘Performing Difference’ (Artsadmin, London 2004)
ISBN 0-9524337-2-9
First published November 2004
(copyright) Artsadmin 2004
Rohini Malik Okon, May 2003
Individual contributions: the artists 2004

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