Jacque et Jerzy

Dr Göze Saner gave a paper at IFTR Barcelona involving a fictitious dialogue between the French philosopher Jacques Derrida and theatre director Jerzy Grotowski. The script was taken entirely from two separate works — The Animal and Me (Derrida) and Performing Animal (Grotowski) — with an imaginary dialogue created by weaving the two texts together. The task was to creatively respond to the paper and document it for academic publication.

I recorded the dialogue six times in total, each part recorded separately — three separate viewpoints for Derrida and the same for Grotowski. The raw footage was ingested into Final Cut and edited. The key challenge was suggesting the pair appear on stage together, achieved in a single wide split-screen shot.

The outcome was a creative response to the dialogue that captured the rhythm and humour of the original talk and made it available online for new audiences.