Gerry Lucas – Winner!
1st performance: Brunton Auditorium, Mount Allison University, Sackville, N.B., 1978
Performance/installation. An open reel tape is prepared using source material from a vinyl record of Gerry Lucas, a former NBA basketball player, telling of his born again experiences with finding Jesus Christ. The spoken word is edited with certain sentence deletions, leaving silent spaces between sentence phrases. Three reel-to-reel tape recorders are placed on stage approximately 2 meters apart, and the playback reel is placed on the first tape recorder. The tape is then fed through the playback heads of the other tape recorders and is eventually taken up by the last machine, so that the tape spans across the stage from left to right. The tape machines are activated to play, and a spoken word canon is created as the tape plays successively through each of the three machines. The delay time of the canon is determined by the physical space between each tape recorder, so that the ‘spatial delay’ determines the ‘time delay’.
©Gordon Monahan 1978
