The reality of the ‘kitchen cycle’…an evaluative response.

Site specific performance has given me the opportunity to explore material which would be futile if transformed to a black box studio or stage. To explore and create something without the theatrical limitations or instant audience preconceptions provides you with a plain, empty foundation for discovery.

“The presence of an audience is central to the definition of theatre, and the twentieth century saw an explosion of interest in the audience’s role among experimental theatre practitioners” (( Freshwater, Helen Theatre and Audience 2009, London: Palgrave Macmillan). ))

The kitchen provided me with a range of ideas which to begin with were instantly based around visualising images food and consumption. Audience preconceptions about kitchens and mine as performer were hard to stem away from. This challenging lane of thought however provoked me in to thinking about a kitchen were control was restricted or lost. I intended to remove this element of socialising which had been part of a kitchen’s heritage for centuries. I had to make audience respond to the kitchen differently. Going against the norm was a tricky performance idea when the site was set up so appropriately for social engagement and ease. This focus on the lack of control forced me to think about a kitchens purpose and function.

The sounds of a kitchen are what users find familiar. These audio ideas were created through simple experimentation with basic kitchen objects and creating the sounds of different aspects simultaneously. These basic ideas stemmed towards the final result and post production of these sounds. Listening to familiar noises on an audio device initiated a performance element instantly, focused around your senses. My sound manipulation coincided with the element of disorder to create an audio performance that consisted of familiar kitchen site noises collaborated, distorted and edited together to create an sense of digestion and lack of order. To make the listening more performative, features were added to the set to increase the feel of manipulated digestion and consumption.

Audiences’ responses to the soundscape varied. Due to the added sensory features and my chaotic consumption, audiences were forced to visualise the site with the added soundtrack to the performance. The headphones in most cases disabled the audience to converse, leaving the performance to be an individual encounter. Only you know what your body does, and it’s something that is rarely spoken about and so to graphically hear elements of contrasting audio sound clips reinforced the lack of control theme which was evident in my initial planning. Audience members tend to stare at me, as if I was an animal in a zoo, enhanced by the torches this made me feel like an object on display, a cog in a machine that wasn’t working properly, something unreal or dysfunctional. It was very interesting to see that some people had confidence when exploring the jars full of various rotted food as others were tense, anxious, and claustrophobic.
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(All pictures taken by myself on 2/5/13 Documentation)

The ability to communicate your message without the norm of speech enabled this performance to become a definite sensory performance. To use senses to transfer messages creates specific independent responses. The reaction to sound, smell and sight vary heavily to those of speech. This excited me as a performer because you were able to engage with them visually, as if they were performing. For the audience/performer shift to be present throughout the performance made the piece heavily link back to a kitchens normal purpose, yet simultaneously taking it out of its original context.

 

The Exhibition is over, pack up, go Home.

That was, in a word, exhausting.

I know I shouldn’t complain and I know that everyone was in a similar state to me (or worse if their piece was durational), but performing each night was extraordinarily draining. That’s not to say it wasn’t deeply satisfying. Looking over my previous posts, I don’t think I ever precisely outlined the terms of my performance, so I’ll elaborate, now that there’s nothing to spoil for the public.

I was the Blind Curator, a tragi-comedic character – this is a man who lives in abject squalor, in a crumbling room, barely large enough for another person to be in there with him. His ‘collection’ is a banal one – everyday objects, often in a state of disrepair are carefully displayed on the shelves of his room. Here are some of them now:

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A thoroughly uninspiring collection, aren’t they?

But just as the audience think that this room is full of worthless items, of no value, the Curator opens mind to them. To his blind eyes, they are treasures, artifacts. They all speak of places unfathomably far away, even if that place is the one he is in now. Suddenly, to the audience members who choose to engage and see these objects through his mind’s eye, they are amazing, they are beautiful, they are ancient and powerful and magical. Those who visit the Blind Curator’s gallery are swept away to worlds of fantasy and imagination, if they let themselves be.

The piece was designed with a basis in the idea of ‘make strange’ that Gob Squad displayed in their office performance (n.d.). I had gathered from around the house (and some objects from the wider world) objects that were, if we’re being brutally honest here, junk. I collected this rubbish and put it on display. But then I freed it. By being blind, I was able to experience these objects with something other than my eyes. And they spoke to me – they told me to lie. The concept of how long one has to have inhabited a space to lie about it was one of the concepts I’ve toyed with and in this case, not only the space became fictional, so did these objects. I weaved narratives around them, dressed them in mythology, gave them new pasts, new futures and ultimately was a liar. But the audience was given a choice – not obviously, but subconsciously. Would they see my narratives as absurd, watching this blindfolded man witter on about what was patently not true? Or would they allow themselves to believe the lie, just for a little while? Unfortunately, due to my blindfolded state, I couldn’t see this decision play out on the faces of the audience, but I could get a sense of how engaged people were in my tales and, for the most part, the audience wanted to believe.

One of the most interesting things I find, looking back at performance, was the unpredictability of the audience. I was particularly bemused by some of the choices that the audience members made when it came to choosing objects to listen about – here’s a tally:

Lock: 7

Mirror: 8

Stone: 3

Cloth: 3

Keyhole: 10

Jack: 8

Curtain: 2

Cardboard: 2

Soap: 8

Bolt: 4

Box: 5

Key: 6

Alarm: 5

Queen: 2

Splinter: 12

Book: 8

King: 0

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The Unloved King

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The Bizarrely Popular Splinter

Still now, I cannot fathom the popularity of that sliver of wood, it puzzles me and makes me second guess the understanding I thought I had of people. I even experimented with changing its positioning yet still it was chosen repeatedly.

Aside from my bafflement regarding that, the whole performance went off without any trouble (with the exception of one woman who wasn’t tall enough to reach up and trace the cracks of the ceiling with me) and was a deeply satisfying experience. While I’ll not miss my time in the gallery, as in was often cold and always cramped and uncomfortable, I shall look back on it fondly and always try to remember the narratives I wove for it.

References:

Govan, n.d. Revisioning Space, The Place of the Artist, [e-journal] P. 123, Available through: Lincoln University Blackboard: http://blackboard.lincoln.ac.uk.

Bye Bye living room!

Well that’s our performances finished, can’t believe it’s over. Things have changed and developed so much from our first tour of the house on west parade. All of our ideas have expanded so much. When we first chose the living room we  were concentrating on our feelings for that room, but as we progressed we realised that the living room is so much more then just a place to ‘relax’ and feel at ‘home’ because there is so many different homes. Our first initial thought were so different to our final performance but in some sense very similar we originally wanted to create an experience for an audience that would be something that is familiar to them, doing things that they would do on a daily basis in their living room, and also bringing back memories of their experiences. Exploring things like watching television ordering pizza and having a glass of wine. We then realised that was quite typical and showing someone life in a living room isn’t necessarily about doing obvious things, maybe it was more then that. Stripping back all the technology and conversation and sitting there in silence gave the audience a chance to reflect on their experiences, It became more about us as performers and the notion that our body images a sort of still picture, were more important then doing something very typical of a living room “I strongly believe that the most powerful tool today is performance  is the artist herself”. ((Conroy Colette (2010) Theatre & The body London:palgrave macmillan))

Sitting in silence and being completely still is harder then I first thought, but the more audience members we had it became easier, by sitting still in silence you begin to really feel the value of silence and find yourself in a relaxed state. “What kind of mental exercise should the performer have to do to prepare?” ((Conroy Colette (2010) Theatre & The body London:palgrave macmillan)) is one the questions Colette Conroy asks in the book “theatre and the body” I feel that this question relates perfectly to our performance because we did not have to prepare physically like in other performance we needed to prepare ourselves mentally. Our minds had to be cleared and we needed to concentrate.We almost became a work of art, a still image that the audience could interpret how ever they wanted to. In my opinion because we had the paused image on the screen it was like someone had pressed pause on our lives.

One thing that I feel went well was, was something we didn’t anticipate because our performance was at night was when it became dark the only light was the light from the television and it reflected on the rubbish and created shadows and an outline of the clutter. This added to the affect that, like the rubbish was art in a some sort of form.

“Audience’s reactions to our room were very different to others in the house, it was very interesting to see how every different audience member did something different. Some people seemed as if they were very comfortable and explored the room as if it was exciting and others found it very daunting and uncomfortable to be in. One audience member could not stand the anticapation and tried to get out because you could see that she phyiscally could not stand that she didn’t know what was going to happen next. The clutter and rubbish shocked the audience even more, and you could tell they were trying to work out why it was there. I feel we filled the room well and had enough stuff to give the feel of a hoarders front room, but we still could have had more!

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Photo Taken by Tiffany Thompson

  “A man walks across this empty space whilst someone is watching him and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged” (( Brook, Peter (1968) The Empty Space, London:pelican books)) . I feel that this quotes sums our performance ideas perfectly. Forgetting for a moment that our room was filled with clutter. The fact that we were sat amongst it as still images is our ‘perfomance’ we did not need to move because the images were enough to create tension and questions for the audience members. 

I don’t want anybody to see my face

“The task of making text for performance” ((Tim Etchells (1999). Certain Fragments. New york: Routledge)) The process of writing performance is something our living room group have always been interested in. We have found ‘Tim Ethcells’ certain fragments fascinating and we have tried to incorporate this into our performance, without it being to obvious. We also struggled to find text or come up with one that related to our room. When reading through a past blog I came across the idea I had when watching ‘Life is sweet’ about how some people may feel like prisoners in there own home. I then expanded on this idea, and so did the rest of our group by coming up individually with a reason why we would be a prisoner in this house. We then decided to use the props we were using, for example pizza boxes news papers and receipts and tell our story without making it obvious to the audience, if they happened to pick up a box with a sentence on it that related to our story and then picked up a receipt with a another sentence or word it wouldn’t matter they didn’t understand it will get the audience asking questions and participating the performance asking questions like Why are we there? Why were we still? What had happened before they entered? , our intention was for the writing to be a code for the audience. The stories we came up with could be anything fiction or non fiction, we tried to make them fictional as possible even if they didn’t make sense. Reading end land stories gave me loads of ideas. (( Etchells Tim (1999) Endland stories London:Pulp Faction))

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The story I came up with goes…

My father abuses me mentally, but the more he abuses me mentally the affects show physically. When he died my face stayed like this forever and now I don’t want to leave to leave my house this causes me to have the disease agoraphobia.

Some of the sentences scattered around the room from my individual story was..

 

  • HE makes my face look worse
  • People stare why should I suffer when they are ignorant?
  • Replace fear with selfishness and indifference
  • I don’t want people to see this ugly stressful face

Our time in the Safe House has come to an end.

Well it’s all over! I can comfortably say not one have us has ever experienced anything quite like the past few months. Site Specific has not only given us and hopefully the audience members an experience to remember, it’s opened up Drama as a subject even further for us as students.
For the CCTV group it’s been harder than we first predicted, we’ve gone from holding placards to the cameras, leaving messages around the house, treasure hunts, to finally finding something worthy of a performance. Instead of focusing on relaying messages to the audiences we decided to show the house in a different context, at night.

Going back to my first blog post, I reeled off the ideas and emotions that came to mind when I first entered the house on West Parade. When looking back now a few of my ideas were trialed and tested and eventually used in the final performances. Our group always wanted to use the CCTV to our advantage, for example whether we informed the audience they were being watched or to leave them to figure it out for themselves.

When the rehearsal process progressed so did our ideas, with the final piece being called Safe House, it developed our ideas for the CCTV room even further. Joining the CCTV group and Hayliegh in the Reception, we were the Agents within the Safe House ensuring their visit goes smoothly. With Hayliegh welcoming the two audience members to the house for their induction in the reception, she listed some rules and regulations within the house. There was then a phone call between me and the downstairs phone on speaker, asking the audience members questions about their choice of clothing, interrogating them as to whether they considered their clothing as a disguise when making way to the Safe House and so on and so forth.

On my performance evenings of the 1st and 2nd of May, improvisation was done during the performances mainly through the phone calls identifying individual visual aspects of each audience member. Identifying personal aspects ensured they knew they were being watched which clearly changed their body language straight away. Being in the Safe House for two performance evenings meant I had the opportunity to see several audience members explore the house and how each individual reacted differently to our weeks of work. When the audience members came across our room towards the end of their time in the house, several entered bewildered discussing their individual experiences, some came in quiet, calm and collected, others even tried interacting with me trying to provoke a reaction. The performance evenings were very exciting and nerve wrecking giving the improvisational aspects, it was fantastic seeing the reactions some audience members had when being asked personal questions about their appearance, watching their eyes race around the room before seeing the camera. One particular audience member entered the CCTV room at the end and were astonished they had been watching throughout the whole piece immediately saying in shock “Oh my goodness they’ve been watching us the whole time!?”

Choosing to leave the CCTV on for the audience members worked out really well, flipping the whole evening in their eyes on it’s head it was fantastic seeing their reaction, after watching this performance for the past sixty minutes and realising they were a part of it and that contradiction of all the performers now being unaware they were being watched. Although ours was an installation piece I was pleased we had the chance to see for ourselves the reaction the audiences had to our work. I can’t quite put my finger on it but there was something magical about watching the audience’s reaction to seeing the house as a whole on the CCTV screen.

Going back to the audience being a part of the performance the Living Room was probably the only room in which the audience had chance to be a performer knowingly. Some audience members literally sat with the performers for the full ten minutes, which was frustrating in that they didn’t explore the room they had put so much effort into. However the realisation set in that they may be trying to be a part of that performance as one audience member in particular sat still with them for the full ten minutes which could have been for that reason or maybe just the anxious, vulnerability they were feeling. The only sad aspect to the performance evenings was not being able to have a feedback session with the audience members afterwards to understand what was going through their minds and also what they took from each individual performance and if it was what we set out to accomplish or something totally different.