In Cities & Elsewhere, a collection of tableaux mouvants, I draw on the traditions of the tableaux vivants of Louis XIV, Delsartean ‘Living pictures’ and the later poses plastiques performance activities, as well as landscape painting and early landscape photography. My work as a performance artist with Possession Arts in Johannesburg in the early 1980s further informs the live still scenes filmed in Cities. Our living tableaux such as ‘Schreber’s Chicken’ and ‘Rain, Steam and Speed’ were set on stage and drew on the transformation of everyday scenes and duration performances, inspired by artists such as Philip Glass, the Wooster Group, Elizabeth LeCompte, Spalding Gray, Benjamin Patterson.

In the first two pieces of Cities, the images present everyday landscapes with little or no movement and minimal sound: a door closing, the cry of a seagull passing, footsteps going by… In time, the counterpoint between film, painting and photography, the reference to everyday reality interchanges with references to other dimensions of reality. The tableaux vivants come about in this transformation to create a living narration of the still landscape into a choreographed gesture in real time.