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.
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.
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.
Performance Day. 04/05/2013
The Performance
Before the actual performance’s that were happening on 1-4th 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 2nd 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.