Unsettling Materialities: The Indexical Relationship of Photography and Theatre in Bodies in Flight’s Model Love

This co-authored article considers Model Love (2008–2011), an intermedial collaboration between an experimental theatre company and a photographic artist. Positioning itself as a conversation arising from an ongoing joint practice, the fragmented dialogic approach engaged in the writing reflects and refracts key salient attributes, as they were elaborated through a variety of performance contexts. In Model Love, the photograph became an adpositional object of performance: variously as foundation for performance, material of performance, documents from performance, and objects alongside performance. However, the several manifestations articulated through the collaboration revealed a central relation at work that was never wholly resolved: between to perform and the photograph. The article seeks to examine a number of discrete, albeit inter-relating, respective positions, between theatre and photography, arising from an appreciation of this unsettled – unsettling – relation. In so doing, what at first appear as countervailing positions emerge as closer affiliations, ultimately testament to the power of appearance. The photographic illustrations and italicized captions are drawn from one particular performance context of Model Love, a durational installation at the Battersea Arts Centre, London, in May 2008.