Monthly Archives: November 2013

“Sitting Still”

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Looking at what through performance, could push the limits of our body and minds.

 

Before we started this experiment, we were given an extract to read on by Marina Abramovic’s performance Nightsea Crossing which is a  durational piece that lasted for seven hours a day and was over a period of 90 days in variety of settings. In order for this performance to be successful, they had to get the right balance of equal personalities in order to create a piece that was meaningful to the both of them.

In this performance Marina and her college  devised a performance showing them exchanging air by locking their mouths and passing oxygen and carbon dioxide between each other.   They had only lasted for seventeen minutes and had collapsed because of their lungs being filled with carbon dioxide.

The spaces they used for the performance were in galleries and museums for seven hour days on the opening and closing times (10am – 5pm) of the galleries and museums.

The meaning behind this piece of performance is about experiencing the moment and connecting with the spectator. In this circumstance Marina and Ulay are sat on chairs, staring at each other, thus creating an atmosphere of energy that in-corporates the audience and making them aware that they are watching a performance.

In one of Marinas performance of Nightsea Crossing she invited the audience to take part and sit with her. This was part of her solo act. Here you were able to see some people get up and leave after a few minutes, whereas one audience member sat with her for the whole day. This brings to light, “the main interest…” in “the process of being sat motionless for a very, very long time” (Kaye, 1996, pg 183).

When it came to us re-enacting Marina’s Nightsea Crossing,  we followed the same concept of sitting across another person whilst keeping eye contact. However, we did not do it for seven hours as it was workshop related. The duration of this performance was 45 minutes. Once this task was completed we had a discussion of how the performance effected us and everyone had a vary of answers from mental to emotional manipulation, thinking that the person opposite yourself is reading your thoughts and bringing out the insecurities that you hid from the world into reality. Furthermore, we were in a studio with quite a number of us being part of the performance, but this did not hinder the concept of isolation, as if there was no one else in the room but you and your performing partner.

In addition to this, some people were able to remain focussed and sat still throughout, whereas, others needed to move about by adjusting their seating positions, some felt like crying and others were falling asleep. My personal experience, was trying to be mentally focused on the task given. At times I would falter by dozing off or start creating stories in my mind in order to while away the time. However, when I began to fall into that state, I would snap back reminding myself that I am performing. This made me analyse the concept of silence and the boundaries in which our minds and bodies can go beyond. Also, I began thinking what internal questions the audience members would have once they were in that environment. Would they pick  up on what was going on in the minds of the performer? Would they too start mimicking the performers slight movements if they were taking part in the act?

The notion of sight was the forefront in the performance, as we the performers subconsciously began mimicking our partner’s slight movements and mannerisms due to our visions becoming blurred and infusing our surroundings into one central point. I felt my partner and I imitating each other unconsciously like moving our head slightly and coughing or blinking. In regards to the blnking I could see that we were both blinking at the same time.

 

Naomi

Work Cited

Kaye, Nick (1996) Art Into Theatre London: Routledge

 

 

 

My Thought Process Part V – Response To Hugging Exercise

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In order to explore the increased level of intimacy that will occur during a one-to-one performance, our group have explored these levels privately as a group. We devised an exercise which borrowed elements from performing artists Adrian Howells and Marina Abramovic. We borrowed Adrian Howells’ concept that we communicate more through touch than voice and mixed that with Marina Abramovic’s durational performances. What we created is an exercise where two people hug for 5 minutes uninterrupted. We then developed this exercise further by experimenting with hugging in different situations which provoked  different feelings of intimacy. First we hugged side by side, then hugging whilst sitting on each other’s lap, then laying down on top of a bed and hugging and finally laying down under the duvet whilst hugging. Please see the post Our first practice by Gabriel for a video of this exercise being performed.

I found that the more intimacy the situation provoked the more intimate the hug became. Hugging under a duvet is a lot more intimate than hugging side by side. The factor of time was also important in developing the intimacy. When we hug someone who is dear to us, rarely do we hug them for even a minute in length at a time even though it may feel longer. By having a set duration of 5 minutes you go on this internal journey that takes you past your boundaries of comfort and into a new place in which only you and the one you are hugging exist in.

For me the most intimate hug was the one which took place under a duvet. I believe this is because of the childhood association we have with the duvet. As a child we believe that being under the duvet is a place of safety and I feel that, that childhood belief transcends the barriers we place upon ourselves as adults. Again, the duration of the hug really aids in going well beyond your internal comfort zone.

We have also come up with how we can incorporate the use of media in our performance. We are going to change the duvet from a physical one to a metaphorical one and see if when people are given something to ‘hide’ under, such as a pseudonym on an online chat room, do they feel like they can go beyond their internal comfort zone and share intimate parts of their lives? This will be something we will need to explore with people who are not in our small group as we are all quite open with each other. We are also going to use a webcam to live stream our performance for the world to see, of course the participants will be unaware of this because we want their reactions to be genuine and not ‘acted for the camera’. We want their reactions to be like that of Marina Abramovic in the video I included in my post My Thought Process Part II. If you have not yet seen this video, please do watch it.

Our first practice

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Based off Adrian Howells performances from where he hugged strangers, for our performance we are inspired by Adrian, the way he breaks down walls and gets incredibly close to the audience this is what we want to achieve.

Practice makes perfect though and we decided to try it out ourselves as a group, the results were interesting and each person had a different experience.

On the video we discuss how it felt for us as a spectator and participator, by doing this by ourselves we found we wanted to give our audience a feeling of a journey. Breaking down the walls of social norm.

We went through different stages of hugs and intimacy, from sitting up and hugging down to hugging under the covers with the lights off, each caused a new experience. To explore this more we would like to find complete strangers to join us in this performance.

Gabriel.

 

And so the journey begins.

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Choosing Contemporary Experimental Theatre as a module was intended to provide myself with a challenged. I didn’t really understand much surrounding the concept of a Contemporary Experimental performance. So far it has been an interesting journey which has provided me with several questions to be answered:

How do we truly define performance?
When does something stop being a performance?
Do we constantly perform? 
Are we really an individual?
Do we really think for ourselves or are we always influenced by other people?
How far is too far when pushing boundaries? For the audience but also the actor?
Is language necessary?
When will something stop being Contemporary Experimental and become the norm?

These questions may never recieve a solid answer because it is mainly down to personal opinion. There doesn’t seem to be any set rules surrounding this idea of Contemporary Experimental.

Influences so far.

Is language necessary for a great performance? In my opinion if the performance is done with the desired effect then there isn’t always a need for words. Marina Abramović is a great example of this with her piece The Artist is Present. Trying out this experiment in class showed how an atmosphere could be created by the simpliest things. It also taught me that sometimes simplicity is the key to success. Throughout the experiment I found it difficult to focus, I would go through stages of drifting away but not really to places that I wanted to go. During this process, as much as I tried not to, I would make eye contact with people other than the person opposite me. Personally I think this was a safety thing, a ‘yeah its all ok, we’re still here’ type thing.

salon_20070627
We also recently explored Adrian Howells and Salon Adrienne which showed how language can be a necessity. In Salon Adrienne language is used to help settle people and make them feel at ease, Adrian has no hidden motive throughout his performances which then helps the participant to ‘open up’ and share with them something that they normally wouldn’t share. Salon Adrienne is situated in a hairdressers and so this automatically set ups the awkward conversations you get with hairdressers. Adrian moves away from the awkward chat and leads you down a more initimate path.

With these artists in mind, I feel it is important to explore the necessity of having words in our own performance. The whole idea of words interests me because in everyday life we hardly use any of the words in the English Language. We tend to stick with the words that we know and use these over and over to describe our situations. The Oxford English Dictionary contains full entries for 171,476 words in current use yet we only use a couple thousand of these in our lives.

The fact that our own performance is just beginning and still has time and space to grow makes me excited because who knows what path we are going to follow. It is going to create more questions which ultimately can only be answered using personal opinions.

My Thought Process Part IV – Formulating Our Performance

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As a group we have been meeting up regularly and discussing the potential avenues our performance could journey through. So far we have decided that we are all interested in doing one-to-one durational performances and we feel that if we each have our own station where we could do this within our overall performance, then we can effectively achieve our goal of everybody doing a one-to-one performance. The durational aspect comes in as we have been allotted the time space of 10:30 – 13:30. So we will have a durational performance lasting three hours. We have also decided that as our performance is currently based on one-to-one performance, there will be a great deal of intimacy between the performer and the participant. I am using the word participant now as we feel that having the audience members perform alongside us is where we want our piece to explore. Due to this heightened state of intimacy that will occur in this performance medium, we have decided that as a group we will explore the concept of intimacy between one another privately before we completely settle on the idea of having this as the bedrock of our performance.

As we are now researching into intimate, one-to-one performances I have turned my attention to the following video as I go about developing my own personal one-to-one experience.