Category Archives: Performance Development

My Station

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After working out what everyone else’s stations were, mine was the last to be found. With having a computer conversation with an anonymous person as the station after mine it need to be something light hearted and easy going because the rest of the journey might prove difficult for some participants because they delved deeper into human bodies, touching, hugging and anonymous conversations.

It was decided that I would be the first person the participant would meet when they first entered the studio, leaving me with the opportunity to welcome them in and have a normal chat with whatever that came up in a conversation.

After showing my station in the tech rehearsal, the feedback I was given meant that I had to be so much more over the top to get the participant to feel welcomed and comforted. The feedback was to have more things laid out on the table like tea, drinks, cake biscuits, flowers and a table cloth to make it look welcoming. Also with the way I had to be dressed was in important to being the first person in the performance. It really made me think about what I could do to improve my station and make it as good as the rest of the performance.

Decision Time

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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.

My station

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We all will be experiencing all the stations but my main one is about body image.

I wanted to challenge myself as a person but make someone think differently. That we shouldn’t judge our bodies, our another person’s body. We need to notice that body image is a social construct.

I myself have always struggled with body image, I suffer from bulimia and often self harm my body, but I wonder what makes me that way? I remember in high school being bullied for my weight, my hair, the way my legs are shaped and even for my disabilities such ridiculous things but it hurt me.

I know it is not only me, this is incredibly common.

“50-88% of adolescent girls feel negatively about their body shape or size.
49% of teenage girls say they know someone with an eating disorder.
Only 33% of girls say they are at the “right weight for their body”, while 58% want to lose
weight. Just 9% want to gain weight.
Females are much more likely than males to think their current size is too large (66% vs. 21%).
Over one-third of males think their current size is too small, while only 10% of women consider
their size too small.”
This is the world we grow up in, this is so common nowadays in society we don’t even think about it, with models too thin, where you have to be a muscular man  and if you’re imperfect well then you aren’t worth thinking about.
I want my audience to go away with the feeling of self worth, to understand that I was not judging their body, that I found their body beautiful, not in a sexual way but to show they are beautiful.
I plan to talk and show the parts of my body, I hate or love or merely want to comment on and I will encourage them to do the same.
I want to show our bodies no matter what they look like are nothing to be ashamed of, not ugly, or wrong in any way.
This may be tough for the audience and I understand that as it will be hard for me too but I hope at least some will decide to do it and feel better about themselves afterwards. I want them to not need to hide their bodies, to be comforted in the fact they are beautiful.
To be as a small child again who doesn’t care what their body looks like.
[ONLINE] Available at: http://www.epi.umn.edu/let/pubs/img/adol_ch13.pdf. [Accessed 24 November 2013].

My Thought Process Part VII – Response to a work-in-progress show

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19/11/13 – This was the date of our work-in-progress show. We demonstrated two of the five stations we will have in our performance to a group of participants who gave us feedback after the work-in-progress show had finished. We used the work in progress show to explore the physical intimacy of holding each other, the use of media through an anonymous username in an online messenger and the durational aspect of our performance. The responses were positive and the feelings our performance elicited from the participants were either exactly or very close to the feelings we were hoping to elicit from them – that of beginning to feel intimacy and trust. Overall the work-in-progress show achieved its aim.

For all four of our stations the performer and the participant will be in a one to one environment. As a group, we decided that this would be the greatest medium to perform in as our piece is about interrogating the idea of the individual by exploring the depths of human intimacy and addressing the barriers we put up inside of ourselves to block out intimacy.

With this in mind, my research has moved away from IS and AS performance and has focused on one to one performance. My research has led me to Mike Pearson and his thoughts on what he calls Solo Performance.

“Solo performance can draw together narratives, data sets and disciplinary perceptions, both like and markedly unlike; in their juxtaposition, overlay and friction at a certain place, they might reveal it’s multi-temporality, and through disciplinary convergences, enhance it’s appreciation.” Pearson, M (2011) 2. Why Solo Performance? [online] Available from: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/landscape/documents/eventpapers/toolkit/2whysoloperformance.pdf [Accessed 21 November 2013]

One vital thought Mike Pearson writes about is this idea that performing one to one can bring different narratives together. I feel this is at the heart of what our piece is about. We are inviting a member of the public to participate in bringing us their story – who they are and what they’re about – as we bring them our story. This coming together of two people with two different lives with the goal of sharing one intimate moment of our separate lives with each other is the heartbeat of our performance.

I will continue to study Mike Pearson’s thoughts on one to one performance and test whether or not they are relevant to our piece as each new thought presents itself.

My Thought Process Part VI – The Journey Of Our Performance

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This post is dedicated to informing our readers of how our performance has developed from our initial conceptions to what we now have.

To begin with, as a performer I am captivated with the combination of durational and one-to-one performance. This is because I feel that a one-to-one performance allows both the performer and the non-performer to begin to experience a very personal journey together and if the piece is durational then they get to complete that journey together uninterrupted.

As the members of this group feel similar to how I do about this performance medium, durational one-to-one performance has always been the heartbeat of our performance idea. To begin with, we wanted to explore the question of ‘There are tens of thousands of words in the English language, so why do we only ever use the same two to three thousand over and over again when we talk to each other?’ To explore this question we were going to take it in turns to read out loud every word and definition in the largest dictionary we could find from cover to cover. We were going to group the words together so one person would read A through to E, the next person would read F through to J and so on.

Through discussing and refining this idea we began to ask ourselves what was the real reason behind asking this question. We came to the conclusion that because we are limiting ourselves from using the full extent of the English language, we were limiting ourselves in the interactions we were having between each other. This provoked the new question of ‘What are we limiting ourselves from in our interactions?’

To answer this, I looked at the very core of human interactions and discovered that it is intimacy which is at the heart of all interaction. For example, if we are very intimate with someone – say a lover or close family member – then we are very happy to engage them and are very open to them in our interactions with them. Likewise, if we are very hostile with someone then we do not even try to engage them and instead we try to cut them off or block their interactions with us. I soon realised that depending on where you are on this line affects your interactions with someone. I then started to question ‘If someone could be moved along this line towards a place of intimacy, would their interactions become more personal, deep and connecting?’

I decided that they would, and when we as a group discussed all of our individual thoughts and research we decided that our piece as a whole should be about moving the participants along this line from where ever they happened to be personally to a place of strong and powerful intimacy with us. Our overarching line of enquiry was ‘What happens if we are very intimate with the participants? Will they reciprocate our intimacy? If they do or if they don’t, what happens then?’ I must stress that our group are not concerned with intimacy in a lustful or sexual way, but instead intimacy between two people as a feeling of closeness.

With our definitive line of enquiry decided upon. We began to list situations of intimacy. We came up with the following – Being with family can be intimate, sharing secrets can be quite intimate, talking about your body can be quite intimate, being held and holding someone can be quite intimate, being on your own can also be quite intimate in the sense that you become more one with yourself.

From our list, we had four one-to-one stations and one solo station. We agreed who would be on what station and arranged them as the following.

Station One (Beth) – Family Intimacy

Station Two (Shellie and Media:Laptop) – Sharing Secrets Intimacy

Station Three (Gabriel) – Body Intimacy

Station Four (Jordan) – Being Held and Holding Intimacy

Station Five (Participant on their own with Media:Live Stream) – On Your Own Intimacy

Personally I am glad to have set up the fractionation that occurs between the first and second station. They go from exploring intimacy with Beth in a representation of family type intimacy to having to sit at a laptop and anonymously type to another anonymous person over an online messenger. We have decided that this different type of intimacy, one of anonymity, is quite jarring and this has been intentionally set up with the hopes that the participants will begin to miss and crave a genuine person to talk to, which they will be presented with in station three. Once they are given a genuine person to talk to, we hope that this will allow the participants to want to move themselves further along the line towards intimacy, which is the aim of the performance.

Please bear in mind that what I have explained to you is how our performance has currently developed. We have a work in progress show coming up soon so this may all change but for now, this is our performance.