“It all begins on the bed. Perhaps our tenderest and perhaps our most ecstatic moments occur there and, if we’re lucky, perhaps it all ends there too” ((Heathcoat, E (2012) The meaning of home, London: Frances Lincoln p.71)) as this extract explains the bed is a huge part of our lives as human beings. The bed, in its simplest form is the place in which we go to sleep. On average, we as homo-sapien’s , sleep for around a third of our lifetime. This alone proves the importance of the bed on our lives. Due to the large amount of time which we spend in bed it could be surmised that it would be a place where we would feel completely comfortable. However it still comes as a shock to people when they learn that we will be using a bed as our main performance space in Safehouse.
There are few examples of the bed being used as a performance space. Tracey Emin created an instillation piece entitled My bed in 1998, this piece reflected her bed without a live aspect to the performance. However this does not mean that we are unable to take inspiration from this piece. In an interview from 2012 when the piece was being exhibited at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, which you can see below:
Emin discusses the feelings she has returning to this work fourteen years after it was originally installed. Explaining the changes which have occurred in that time in her life and how that getting back into that bed to make it look correct for exhibition immediately brings back memories of that time. Pearson, in his book Site – Specific Performance takes this idea further, explaining that it not only the creator of the work but also the audience who are “informed by past experiences of how similar and how dissimilar this is to places you have known” ((Pearson, Mike (2010) Site – Specific Performance, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan p.29)) especially when watching a site – specific performances.
[peekaboo_link start=”Jake1″] WARNING – READING MORE OF THIS POST WILL REVEAL PERFORMANCE DETAILS! [/peekaboo_link][peekaboo_content name=”Spoilers” start=”hidden”] [peekaboo_link start=”visible”] Warning! Spoilers! [/peekaboo_link][peekaboo_content name=”Spoilers” start=”hidden”]
With this in mind, the performance we have created in the bed has been designed to inspire the audience to recall events from their own lives. Putting our audience to bed and reading them a story is a very childlike experience through which, we hope, our audience will respond and remember what it was like to actually be put to bed as a child. Later, putting a sleeping mask on our audience and joining them in bed should inspire more adult memories to surface in their minds. Both of these experiences should allow the audience to recall happy memories of the bedroom. This is a completely different experience to that which the Voyeur will be having at the exact same time.
Although they will be happening simultaneously the two performances in the bedroom are incredibly different. In this sense we have created the bed as a performance of its own, a room of its own perhaps. This idea of the bed being a room of its own is discussed by Heathcoat, speaking about the history of the bedroom, and its uses to Monarch’s of the middle ages, he says that “the only privacy to be had was by turning the bed itself into a room” ((Heathcoat, E (2012) The meaning of home, London: Frances Lincoln p.72)).The audience member, with the sleeping mask on and in bed, has privacy and is in some way in a room of their own, gaining an experience which is solely theirs.
The performance which takes place is the bed will, we hope, bring to the forefront of our audiences minds memories of the bed and bedroom which they have experienced as children and adults. It is an extremely personal moment to get into bed with another person and something which is not a usual occurrence for the majority of people. I think this is why most people will feel somewhat apprehensive when they first encounter our performance. However, audience members seem to settle into the performance quickly and especially in the bed become comfortable through the childlike manner in which they are first treated. [/peekaboo_content]