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.

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.