Uncategorized – ________-Safe House-_________

The End.

Samuel Davis / May 13, 2013May 13, 2013 / Uncategorized

After three performances, my time at East Lodge is over. I have really enjoyed the process from the very beginning when I first explored the house. At the time, I was asked to pick my favourite room; I am glad I chose the living room. It provided many different opportunities for performances due to its positioning in the house and the large amount of space available.

I think the most striking part of our performance was the fact we were completely still, unmoving and frozen in time. The notion of injecting a space that visually looks like it has been left for months with human bodies created an interesting piece of performance. I spoke with some audience members after the performance to gather feedback; I received similar responses in that they felt very uncomfortable in the room. I think this is because the audience were left to their own devices, they weren’t told specifically to do something. However, this brings me to a point in our performance where we had to adjust slightly. Originally, Hayley would bring the audience member in and ask them to sit in a particular place on the settee. However, we realised if we didn’t give them this instruction, then it gave them a choice. It opened up the possibility of allowing them to explore the space, or just simply sit in complete silence for ten whole minutes. Some waited for us to move, which also added to the tense feeling that some experienced. Others tried to interact and when they failed, they resigned to sifting through the material. Initially, we were frustrated that some audience members simply sat down for the whole ten minutes whilst some really got into the material and explored the whole of the room. However, retrospectively, for those audience members who didn’t move and stay sat down, that could be interpreted as them joining in with the performance. Perhaps they thought that they should keep still too.

Visually the room was littered with a massive amount of detritus that was collected over a long period. I personally wanted to create a lasting first impression for the audience members. This was the second performance space they would get to see and I wanted them to open that door and be completely surprised with what lay behind it. The material not only made it difficult for the audience to navigate our room, but it also gave a glimpse as to the type of people who may have lived in this space. In my previous posts, I have talked about Rodinsky’s Room; there are many other examples of rooms that have been uncovered after years of been untouched. (Most recently is this example of a Parisian apartment that has been left locked for seventy years. ((http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2323297/Inside-Paris-apartment-untouched-70-years-Treasure-trove-finally-revealed-owner-locked-fled-outbreak-WWII.html))) For me, the importance of creating that feel of a lost room was something that I think we achieved.

A panorama photo of the living room on performance day. Photo taken by Sam Davis.

Tapping into what normally happens in a living room was also important. I decided to buy different sized photo frames for the living room; I then inserted the detritus from around the living room. One photo frame for example had a Quavers crisp packet inserted into it. I think this was very effective; it is something that people do in their homes. They display photos and memories with pride, I wanted to create a similar sense but use the environment and the material around us to seed into that.

A collection of the frames that were displayed in the living room. Photo taken by Sam Davis.

There were many ideas that developed and evolved over time. Originally, we were going to order pizza in the performance. We thought the smell and act of watching someone eat may provide an interesting performance. However, we soon realised this was too literal, we needed to think more about the space and what that could do rather than the actions of us the performers. Also we decided on four different screenshots from films that were changed each night. We used Hitchcock’s Rear Window and a recent film called Disturbia – both touch upon the act of watching someone else (voyeurism) and both have really striking images that frame what our room is about. The final image that I chose for the last performance was a pre-recorded sequence that had been filmed using the CCTV cameras, I decided to use the very beginning of this clip where the living room is empty. It provided a contrast as it showed what the room looked like before the material had taken over. It tells the audience that something has happened in this space.

A selection of the screenshots shown across the four performances.

1) Rear Window film dir. Alfred Hitchock	2) Disturbia film dir. D.J. Caruso
3) Pre-recorded CCTV footage	4) Rear Window film dir. Alfred Hitchock

We have took the neglected state of the house and created our own extreme version by using all the collected waste scattered through the room. Our aim for this, was to subvert the audiences thinking of how a room should normally be looked after. Thinking about this after the performance has also made me think about the other extreme. What would of happened if the living room was empty, there was no furniture and yet it still tried to retain the sense of being lived in by using a still human body to insert some sort of humanity.

Personally, I think site specific performances have to let the audiences share the space with them. These performances rely on some form of participation. I think our room worked well because it allowed the audience to share it with us, this is something New York artist Vito Acconci advocates:

“setting up a field in which the audience was, so that they became a part of what I was doing… they became part of the physical space in which I moved” ((Goldberg, R. (2001) Performance Art. New York: Thames & Hudson. p.156))

Whilst the performance on West Parade didn’t go to some of the extremes that Acconci does in his performances, I do agree with this statement. If audiences do become part of the physical spaces in which they enter, then they can fully share the range of emotions, feelings and understandings that is associated with site specific performance.

Bye Bye living room!

Lauren Elizabeth Walker / May 13, 2013May 13, 2013 / Home, Performance process, Research, Rooms, Uncategorized, West Parade

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!

rubbish — 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

Lauren Elizabeth Walker / May 13, 2013May 13, 2013 / Home, Performance process, Uncategorized, West Parade

“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))

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

People specific performance.

Jozey Wade / May 9, 2013May 12, 2013 / Documentation, Home, Performance process, Rooms, Uncategorized

Photo taken 01/02/2013 by Jozey Wade

When I first set foot in the bathroom of our house, back in January, I wrote in my many scribblings of notes (some of which can be seen below) that I was drawn to it because of the privacy, safety and solitude attached to it. I don’t think, on that first day, I could have possibly imagined the journey I would go on in that small room. Not only in relation to what I would learn about bathrooms, but also – and more importantly – about human nature, and even myself.

Photo taken 05/02/2013 by Jozey Wade

I spent a lot of time in the first stages of my process deliberating on what I could wear in the bath to cover my modesty and yet remain true to the site and performance. I did not want to wear clothes, just for the sake of being covered if t didn’t make any sense – of course, in the bath we are generally always naked. I came to the decision of being naked without much though of what it might mean for me and it was only once I started putting it into practice, particularly in front of others, that I began to find it difficult and feel uncomfortable about the prospect. “To be naked is to be deprived of our clothes and the word implies some of the embarrassment which most of us feel in that condition. The word nude, on the other hand, carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone.” ((Kountouriotis, P. (2009) ‘Nudity, nakedness, otherness and a “still difficult spectator”‘, Movement Research Performance Journal, (34), pp. 1-16.)) This is true. And at first, I felt like I was naked. Later on down the line, when I became accustomed to it, I then felt like I was nude. It has since occurred to me that what bothered me during those difficult few weeks of trying to be brave was not people judging my naked body, but people judging the fact that I was naked at all in front of them.

This is where it became interesting. People’s reactions to my performance in the bathroom were, initially, what worried me. However, it ended up being people’s reactions that made this piece so interesting and even important to me. In creating their participatory performance encounters, performance artist pair, Lone Twin are always “interested in considering what good could come from these encounters” ((Lavery, Carl & David Williams (2011) ‘Practising Participation A conversation with Lone Twin’, Performance
Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, XVI(4), pp. 7-14)) and that really resonated with what I wanted from my performance. Rather than purely to shock people, I wanted them to feel reassured. I wanted them to come in, maybe expecting the worst based on what they saw, but then unexpectedly quite enjoy themselves and take something pleasant away from it. As Lone Twin said, “It’s good to dance with someone else, good to be friends with somebody else, good to walk with someone else” ((Lavery, Carl & David Williams (2011) ‘Practising Participation A conversation with Lone Twin’, Performance
Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, XVI(4), pp. 7-14)) and that is what what performance was about – sharing.

Photo taken 05/02/2013 by Jozey Wade

Even though I set up the bathroom to be as inviting as possible, with candles, bubbles, music and all sorts of bath lotions, some audience members that joined my company, naturally, enjoyed it more and felt more comfortable than others. For a couple of people specifically, the idea of being in a bathroom with a naked girl, being asked to “give me a hand” washing my back, seemed to be quite painful. Perhaps it was to do with past experience in their lives, or perhaps – like me some way through this process – they had yet to see how such an experience could be anything but bizzare and uncomfortable. Despite the fact that there were these couple of people who didn’t respond as I hoped them to, it surprisingly didn’t take away from the performance for me. Seeing how different people reacted was part of what made it interesting. Seeing the people who I perhaps expected to be uncomfortable chatting away to me and really getting involved, as much as the people I expected to be comfortable, really struggling with being in there at all. In addition, it’s worth noting that, even the people who didn’t “get” as much from the experience (and this was, as I said, only a couple) were in no way judgmental or rude – on the contrary they only commented on how they thought I was brave and how they could not do such a thing themselves. As my final audience member put so eloquently during his visit – “It makes you realise that not that many people are actually dicks!” and this could not be more true.

Photo taken 08/02/2013 by Jozey Wade

I would be lying entirely if I said every aspect of this performance process has been enjoyable for me. It has been difficult. At times I’ve felt engaged and eager and at times it’s felt almost impossible. I think that is what has ended up making it such an important experience for me. It has opened doors, not just within the performance world, but also with regards to my own mentality. No performance I have ever done before has come close to affecting me in the way being in that bathroom has, and I could not be more glad that I pushed myself, and was pushed by Conan and my fellow performers, through the doubts and difficulties. The experience really taught me a great deal about trust, sharing and human interaction – as I hope it did for my audience members.

And it’s over…

Tiffany Abatilda Thompson / May 6, 2013May 12, 2013 / Performance process, Rooms, Uncategorized, West Parade

When first going to the house I thought we had it easy, but I was wrong. You could go along the path and just perform things you do in a house and not go above and beyond and explore the wonders of site specific. Being in the living room was tough as you could get drawn into doing something safe but I feel we really explored with the living room, we really tried to push the limits of what we could do with the space.

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Performance Day. 04/05/2013

The most difficult part of the process was finding something strong and developing it. The idea of doing the norm in the living room by watching T.V but exaggerating it so it illuminates the audience to the extent that they see that we are wasting our lives in front of the T.V and social sites. We are not what it used to be like going out and socializing with friends, we are just getting sucked into a uncontrollable void that we can’t get out of. Everybody’s becoming obsessed with T.V shows more than important things in your life such as family, exercise, and friends, and that’s what we wanted to show.

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Performance Day. 04/05/2013

With the interior of ‘Safe House’ being so shabby we thought that dressing the living room in pizza boxes, booze bottles and various rubbish and receipts show’s how people live and have lived but once the T.V is on everything stops. Collecting all rubbish for the living room was especially hard as we needed more for it to look effective and with only three of us collecting them it took some time.

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Performance Day. 04/05/2013

The Performance

Before the actual performance’s that were happening on 1-4^th may, the ‘Safe House’ had a few tester audience members this is when I realized actually how hard this performance is going to be. Even though we are doing very little in this performance, I knew it was going to be quite physical. Our original plan was to stand/or sit in the same position for four straight hours but when we had the audience member’s in for the tester performances staying still for just an hour was so physical. I was finding myself twitching at every point when the spectator turned away from me. I was disappointed as I knew I wasn’t really focusing on the task just the fact of how physical it was. When it was my night to perform I had mixed feelings about how the audience were going to react, are they going to look around? Are they going to pick up things? Are they going to talk to us? Reflecting from other experience’s I thought at least one person is going to try and talk to us.

During my first night of performance we decided to change it a little and alternate who stood up and who sat as I thought it would be fair, now when I look back I regret doing this as I think we would have got a better reaction if we did stand still for the full four hours as I think the strain of doing that would have made the atmosphere in the living room a lot more intense. However, we did get a good reaction from some audience members. Whilst being in the living room one of the pair went into a cupboard and the other was left with us in the living room, most of the audience members just stood there and stared not moving as they felt uncomfortable. One Person in particular had a very different reaction to the rest; Lauren Olerenshaw a current 2^nd year drama student got in the room and felt very uncomfortable as i was facing the T.V I couldn’t really see much of her but from what I could see was that Lauren was very uncomfortable as she kept pacing around. Lauren also tried to get out of the room as I could hear her trying to pull the door. Lauren is an outgoing confident person and to see her so uneasy made me think about the effect the living room had on people. Most of the audience members did feel uneasy I could see some of it in their body language and also when they came to talk to me after the performance.

The last performance of the four days was the best performance yet. The audience member’s were great; we got so many different reactions. Whilst in middle of the performance one pair of audience members came met up after being separated and said the line ‘I understand now’ as a cue line for Libby the rabbit to come bursting through the door, just as they said the line Libby came bursting through. Previous to this we had stacked cans and bottles behind the door so when Libby came through it would make a noise that could be heard all over the house. Just as Libby opened the door the pair jumped out of their skin and screamed. I struggled to keep still as all I wanted to do was laugh, it was the best reaction we had all over the four performance days. Towards the end of the last performance I could feel the strain the house had on me. Saturday’s performance was the best I ever performed throughout the whole process.

If I were to perform again I would love to make the living room bigger and better and play with the idea of hoarding but to the extreme. I would gather more pizza boxes and collect more receipts, newspapers, and books and stack them as high as the ceiling as hoarders are usually organised and have their belongings stacked. I would want to fill the room only leaving a very narrow footpath for the audience to just about fit in. I would also play with the idea of T.V more by maybe adding more T.Vs or adding many laptops to show the audience the obsession with social networking and the internet. Similarly, I would still be sat still but possibly in different unconventional place such as the arm of the sofa, a table, or on a cupboard.