What were we going to do for our performance?

We had so much to choose from but we all liked the idea of a durational and one on one performance. After looking at Marina Abramovic and Adrian Howells we decided that our best option was to create our own performance around different styles of one on one performances.

Adrian Howells is also known for his one on one performances. His work is based on touching and getting to know people through touching their bodies. One performance we looked at was a one on one performance where he would wash someone’s feet and then kiss them after. He would ask for permission to kiss their feet so he didn’t offend anyone. From the video we watched, he got a mixed response from his participants with one of them being reduced to tears. This was intriguing and I wanted to find out more. The other video we watched was Salon Adrienne where he would wear women’s clothes and would wash and dry their hair in their usual hair salon. Even though he was dressed as a woman, to me, he didn’t come across as woman because he was just acting as himself. He would have a general conversation with the women and he would touch on subject like ‘has this happened to you before’ or ‘do you find this an odd experience’. Asking those kinds of questions makes the participant really think about what is happening. One the more interesting things are that Adrian always gave his participants the option to opt out at any point. I think that giving someone the opportunity to say no if they feel uncomfortable is a vital point to your experiment. If you’re forcing someone into doing something they don’t want to do will become a completely different experience and you will get completely different results. However, if they do say no because they are uncomfortable then that opens the opportunity to ask them why they feel uncomfortable which could then spark a whole new conversation.

Using these two as influences we decided to create our own one on one performances. We came up with the idea to have different stations that the participant would experience. Our first initial idea was read every word and definition from the dictionary and that would be how long our performance would last. We really liked the idea of durational which fitted in with the dictionary idea and the previous experience of staring at someone for a period of time.

An idea arose about human intimacy and how it can be shown through different things in everyday life. For example social networking sites, people go on these sites and sometimes they don’t know who they are talking to, which brought up the question how far could you go when talking to a complete stranger, how much could you tell them. We wanted to do something similar to this in our performance.

Looking at human intimacy we thought of an idea on how a young child feels in their bed at night and the quilt is their safety blanket from the monsters under their bed or in their closet. From this we did our own experiment, in which we hugged one another for five minutes in different scenarios. The first one was sat next to each other and hugged, the second sat on the others lap and hugged, the third laying on a bed (on top of the covers) and did the same for five minutes and the final one was hugging under a quilt for five minutes. This became a point of interest that we wanted to carry on into our performance.

Another idea that was brought into conversation was the human body. Many people all over the world hate their bodies, inside and out. We discussed how we could do this for a station in our performance and we realised that insecurities was the main thing that we could look into. This was another option of the human intimacy that was mentioned earlier. One of the group members wanted to look more into this because of personal issue with his own body and how he has overcome or not the issues and everyday problems that occur. This was another point of interest that we wanted to carry forward.

We then watched a video that involved Andy Wahol’s work. The screen test to start with was a little weird because the participant sat in front of a camera when they thought they were there for an interview, when in actual fact they were taking part in a performance. The person running the performance has already pressed record when the participant arrives, once they are sat he/she tells them that they are just leaving the room and it will start when they return. After a period of time he/she returns and tells the participant is done. Recording someone doing nothing is actually really interesting because you get to see what they are like when they are completely relaxed in their own mind. This was another durational piece that caught our eye.

Four down, one more to find.