Pinchbeck, M., 2016.

Sit with me for a moment and remember: a provocation

A bench with a plaque reading Sit with me for a moment and remember is placed in a public space and a one-to-one performance takes place. It is both a dedication to a loved one and an invitation to a stranger. You are invited to sit on the bench to listen to a recording that reflects on what it means to sit for a moment and remember. For Owning Your Walrus, Michael Pinchbeck reflects on his recent one-to-one performance, Sit with me for a moment and remember. This was a site-specific piece presented in Derby, Leicester, Manchester, Nottingham and Sheffield between 2012-2015, supported by Hatch, Hazard, In Good Company and Wrought Festival. A meditation on remembering, solitude and loss, the piece enacts an encounter with an absent friend or loved one. Pinchbeck becomes both a stranger and a ghost, a living presence and a fleeting memory of someone or something the audience member has lost. Now looking at loneliness through the lens of one-to-one performance and the process of making Practice as Research itself, Pinchbeck relates the experience of performing the piece to the writing on absence by Peggy Phelan and Jacques Derrida. He considers how we might perform absence and in doing so, evoke memories of presences. This provocation continues Pinchbeck's research interests into ?Staging Loss? and performing absence, which recently surfaced in a symposium he co-convened with Andrew Westerside at the University of Lincoln, Staging Loss: Performance as Commemoration.