Peep

Abstract

This article discusses Peep, a one-to-one performance inside a constructed confessional booth. Peep invited participants to play at performing a penance and what was experienced was an extraordinary series of private performances through a peep-hole that affected most players to the point of altering their physical and emotional states in both real and imaginary contexts. The paper also explores the methods used to maintain an ethical way of engaging in one-to-one performance – protecting the participant from revealing their sins through a strategy created by the artist/confessor named as the ‘unsent confession’. This paper argues that certain play strategies offer the participant a sense of liberty within intimate performance and thus producing the works' efficacy. The writing frames the notion of conceptual adaptation in practice and describes how hybrid characters relating to self and other can enable a participant to engage in transformation. The article also argues for the work as a positive alternative to traditional notions of confession and as an empowering participatory experience as witnessed in the slippage between a ‘synchronicity (in relation to undisclosed knowledge) and synchronicity (the collaboration involved in a playful one-to-one).