Author: Kayleigh Anne Brewster

So it ends…

Kayleigh Anne Brewster / / Home, Performance process, West Parade

There were a variety of different feelings running through me as we were packing up the house after our last performance. It has most definitely been an experience that I doubt I’m going to forget. There have been many different challenges with creating this performance. After working in the bedroom, and working with the other students who chose the bedroom, I feel proud. Especially of Lauren and Lauren, who had the exceptionally hard challenge of pushing the boundaries of their personal comfort whilst in the cupboard. However, they did it and I think the reactions that we received from the audience members indicated that the risks were worth it.

During my performances with Lauren W the reactions of the audience members ranged dramatically. Lauren faced people sitting there refusing to meet her eyes, people speaking in response to the narrative, and people bursting into tears. I found myself faced with people uncomfortable and tense in their blindfold, with some people who were chatty and relaxed in response to my narrative, and some people who seemed like they might actually fall to sleep. The varied emotions that were shown by the audience members, I think, showed that the four of us had created a strong piece that had the ability to affect people.

The performance itself was an interesting experience because you had to be alert at all times, and yet you could relax as well. It was disconcerting to be in the middle of a performance, knowing there were audience members in the house somewhere, when suddenly your lecturer pops into your room in his quest to avoid the audience, or when you would quickly nip into another room to pass on a message or ask a question. To be so aware of where the audience is in the house, but to also know that they’re not aware of you yet, because they hadn’t entered the little world you had created in the house was strange. Those things added an extra dimension to the performance when the audience members went into the cctv room and were able to watch you in the in-between moments between audience members.

During the creation process we all had our individual rooms to work on, so it was interesting to realise at the end of the final night how the rooms all fit together. How the living room comments on tv, and the waste of life, were twisted when the audience entered the cctv room. How in the kitchen the rabbit, and the impossibility of their task, linked to the bedroom with its bedtime story and the “going through the rabbit hole” concept of the cupboard. It was nice to see that whilst each room had its own specific purpose, they linked to create a whole experience.

At the end of the night it was also strange to think about where we started, to think that during the very first session Lauren W and I were sat together in a cupboard writing about our first impressions and memories. It thent became a tentative idea, using video and installation, about the connotations that surround the bedroom. Until it finally became the piece we presented, where we offered two separate experiences using ourselves as installation, or using our own memories and experiences to fuel a bedtime narrative. Thinking back on it, there are a few things that I would do differently. I think I would now be able to expand the narrative I used, I think that I would, and should, have made even more of a distinction between how I treated the voyeur and the ‘child’ audience. After all, Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

I’ll protect you from the night

Kayleigh Anne Brewster / / Home, Performance process

When writing the narrative for the audience member who would be put into bed we thought it would be good if we tried to make it somewhat dreamlike, and comforting. We want the audience member to be given a sense of security from the words that were spoken, and the tone. We want them to feel safe. So in order to do that we decided to base our narratives on the theme of safety, on thoughts of protecting someone, and so the two of us ended up basing our narratives on our younger siblings.

It’s said that “In a rapidly changing world, time and memory are key concerns for contemporary artists… our lives our punctuated by objects, feelings and ideas that are endlessly retrieved and re-used.” (de’oliveria 2010) So therefore it would make sense that Jake and I would use our own emotions and memories to fuel a narrative that designed specifically to make the audience members feel protected. The narrative that I’ve written on is based on experiences I had when my younger brother and I shared a bedroom, and the nightmares/terrors he used to experience.

“Many under[stand] caring as a sibling practice that was integrally related to practices shaped by their pre-determined position in the sibling birth order hierarchy.” (Edwards, 68, 2006) and in my case it was no different. I am 3 and a half years older then my brother, and that difference in our age made me protective of my brother. It was my job as an older to sister to make his life hell, but to also protect him from anyone or anything else.

My narrative was based on a time when we had first moved to Canada, we were in a different country, we didn’t have any friends other than each other to begin with; and Aaron didn’t like his room. He was only young back then, I think about three years old, maybe four. He didn’t like the sound that the wind would make against his window; it gave him nightmares that made him wake up screaming. So our mother decided that we would share a room with each other, during the day we would make each other crazy, annoying one another, but when it came to bedtime I would remember that Aaron didn’t like the night, hated what he thought was hiding in the dark. “The images and emotions associated with the dream may haunt us throughout the day, sometimes for years. Nightmares prompt us to seek others. Who prefers to be alone after a nightmare? The fear and sense of dread is so intense as to be palpable.” (McNamara 2008 P1) So I suppose its little wonder that no matter what fallouts we had during the day, when I saw how fearful he was after a nightmare I would try and comfort him. I told him that when I sang to him it was a spell of some kind, that it would protect him. I sang to him for years, when we lived in Canada, when we lived in Abingdon and then when we moved to Grantham. Actually the last memory I have of singing him to sleep was when we lived in Grantham, I’d just started High School and Aaron had just started a new primary school, and I think that he was nervous.

So, when writing my version of the narrative that the ‘parent’ performer would be saying I tried to think about all of these emotions, tried to base it on the how I felt as an older sibling trying to protect and comfort a younger one. It won’t be able to comfort everyone who is put into the bed, we’ve found that many find putting the blindfold on, and being in bed with someone else whilst you’re wearing a blindfold disconcerting. Unfortunately, we don’t want the people being placed in the bed to realise what is happening with regards to the cupboard, we want the two experiences to be as separated from each other as the can be. Some people who are put into the bed won’t be able to let go of the fear they have that’s the result of one of their senses being taken from them. They won’t be able to relax, or to listen to the words that are being whispered into their ears. But I’m hopeful that for those who embrace the experience they will be able to understand the emotions and memories that have gone into the narrative; that they will be able to feel the sincerity behind the words that are being spoken to them.

Works cited:

De Oliveira, Nicolas, Nicola Oxley, Michael Petry  (2003) Installation Art in the new millennium London: Thomas & Hudson. Ltd

Edwards Rosalind, Lucy Hadfield, Helen Lucey, Melanie Mauthner (2010) Sibling Identity and Relationships: Sisters and Brothers Abingdon: Routledge

McNamara, Patrick (2008) Nightmares: the science and solution of those frightening visions during sleep USA: Praeger Publishers.

In the dark we dream

Kayleigh Anne Brewster / / Documentation, Home, Performance process, Rooms

As we continue through the creation process of our piece we seem to keep coming back to the concept of dreams. As we are performing in the master bedroom, I suppose it is unsurprising that we keep circling back to this subject. After all it is in our bedrooms that we sleep, and in so doing it is where we dream. It is said that “the strangeness of our night time narratives is actually an essential feature, as our memories are remixed and reshuffled, a mash-up tape made by the mind.” (lehrer, 2010) So if dreams are an essential feature in our lives then perhaps it is only natural that that we keep returning to the thought, because it is essential to the bedroom.

But how do we use dreams in our performance? We’ve had many ideas of how to go about this for example, having our dreams written on pieces of paper and then sticking them to the outside of the cupboard.  Dreams are essential in the way that we grow, they help us commit necessary moments of our life to memory, and they help us work through emotional issues that we have. Therefore placing these fragments from our dreams on the outside of the cupboard would fit into our performance quite nicely. After putting one of the members of the audience to bed, in a childlike manner, and then forcing the voyeur to look at the image of a naked woman, bound in a cupboard would signify two extreme contrasts between childhood and adulthood.  

WP_000121

Photo taken by Kayleigh Brewster

Therefore, by placing them in the cupboard door we could signify the process of growing up, the importance of dreams in that process and the connection between dreams and the bedroom. Placing the dream fragments there would also be significant as “according to Freud’s theory, dreams potentially communicated forbidden wishes and desires from the unconscious.” (Pick, 2004, 39) Whilst the naked body seems to be more frequent on the stage, the process of having that person naked, blindfolded, hand-cuffed and bound feels extremely taboo. Whilst books like 50 Shades of Grey written by E.L James or Sylvia Days Bared To You have brought other sexual practices to light, for example BDSM, the inclusion of these practices has given our piece a feeling of the ‘forbidden’ that fraud mentions.

In our performance the fact that the two female performers are hidden from view until a specific moment heightens the fact that what the ‘voyuer’ is watching something forbidden. When the ‘voyeur’ then realises the position that the two performers are in, that it connects with sexual practices that have only recently come to the forefront in literature heightens the link between fraud’s theory of forbidden desires in dreams, the visual aspects of having the dreams written out on the cupboard, and the vulnerable position of the performer in the cupboard.

However we decided we wanted to make the cupboard seem completely separate from the rest of the room in order to completely separate the aspects of adult and child, and to make the opening of the cupboard a more dramatic reveal. So, what if we could make the bedroom itself seem dream like, without the use of words or covering the cupboard? What if we take pictures drawn in a childlike manner and cover the walls with them? That would make the room seem something other than normal and would still link to the original set up of putting the child to bed. Also, we began to focus on what the ‘parent’ performer would be saying to the audience in member who was being put to bed. What If we could make the narrative that the ‘parent’ performer speaks to the audience member like a dream?

WP_000127

Photo taken by Kayleigh Brewster

Works cited:

Lehrer, Jonah (2010) Why We Need To Dream http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/19/why-we-need-to-dream/  (last accessed 12/4/2013)

 

edited by Daniel Pick and Lyndal Roper Hove (2004) Dreams and history : the interpretation of dreams from ancient Greece to modern psychoanalysisNew York: Brunner-Routledge 

When you open the cupboard will you ask yourself, when did I grow into this?

Kayleigh Anne Brewster / / Performance process, Technical

With regards to the cupboard the four of us have had many ideas of how to approach it. Is it a space for a performance to take place? Is it a place that should just be viewed by the audience? The answer of how we should approach the cupboard seems to have alluded us so far, but recently we have been discussing the ideas of installation art. The function of the cupboard in its most basic form is to store the possessions of whoever resides in the bedroom. Therefore would it be effective to take that notion of storage and possessions and turn it into an art piece for our performance?

It would seem that “The final decade of the 20th century saw the passage of installation art form a relatively marginal art practice to the establishment in the current central role in contemporary art. ‘These days installation art seems to be everybody’s favourite medium,’ wrote the influential American critic Roberta Smith in 1993.” (2003, P.13) Thus the four of us have decided to experiment with converting the cupboard into an installation piece, using its function for storage in an artist way. If we mix objects from our childhood with objects that we own as adults will the mixture represent the different connotations of the bedroom?

A bedroom, as mentioned earlier, has two clear purposes, the child’s bedroom which seems so innocent, and an adult’s bedroom that is viewed with sexual connotations. “To create a piece of Installation is to make it with a direct correlation to the environment with which it exists. There must be a direct physical relationship to its location.” (Schaefer 1994) which is something we have considered when thinking about using the cupboard as a piece of installation art. By putting objects that are found in a typical bedroom, whether it is a child’s or adults, we are creating a physical relationship between the bedroom and the function of the cupboard in an artistic way. “A form of art that is not defined in terms of any traditional medium but in terms of the message it conveys by whatever means.” (2003, P.14) So we must now consider what message we are trying to send to the audience with our installation art.

As I seem to have mentioned in my previous posts, perhaps the mixing of adult and child like content is to signify the chaos that is associated with growing from a child into an adult. After all the book that we have chosen to read to our audience members, Alice in Wonderland, is often considered to be the story of the how the girl Alice is growing up, and how the author misses the innocent girl that she used to be. (Maata, 1997) Perhaps that is another of the messages that we would like to convey, the loss of innocence as we find ourselves growing up.

As each person grows they don’t notice the changes that occur within themselves. They look in the mirror every day, they think about different subjects’ everyday, and so the progress of time isn’t noted. They are unable to see themselves change because everyday they face all of their smallest changes head on. It isn’t until someone we haven’t seen for a long time, or spoken to for a long time, tells that we have changed do we notice it ourselves. We don’t necessarily realise we’re growing, both in mind and in body, until we specifically think about. So when you are faced with a cupboard filled with items from your childhood, and from your adulthood, will it make you think about how much you have changed? When you look into this cupboard where there is no middle ground between what you were as a child and what you are now. What happened to make you who are you are? What is the difference between who you were as a child and who you are in the present? Perhaps you will wonder when exactly you began to change. Will you wonder when you began to realise the world wasn’t black or white, but grey? Will you ask yourself, when did I grow into this?

 

Works cited:

 

De Oliveira Nicolas, Oxley Nicola, Petry Michael (2003) Installation Art in the new millennium London: Thomas & Hudson. Ltd

Maatta,Jerry, (1997) http://www.alice-in-wonderland.net/explain/alice841.html Sweden; March. (last accessed 8/4/2013)

Schaefer, Janek (1994) 6 Elements of Installation http://www.audioh.com/press/6elements.html (last accessed 9/4/2013)

child + adult = teenager?

Kayleigh Anne Brewster / / Home, Performance process, Rooms

“Days of tensions, brite nites of dreams” (Etchells, 1999) is a simple sentence that brings to light the sometimes tense atmosphere of life and the relaxed ‘brite’ nature of dreams. Reading this sentence lead me to think about the mixture of the two, the contradiction of relaxation and tension, which ultimately lead me to think about the contradiction between dreams and nightmares. In the session on Tuesday we began to discuss the contradiction between dreams and nightmares and working with the concept of a non/abusive parent figure. With this we were discussing the idea of having a kind ‘parent’ and having a nightmare emerge from the wardrobe, then we could flip this idea on its head by having an abusive parent and then having a dream or imaginary friend coming from within the wardrobe. This would also play with the idea that there are children who are perfectly safe in their reality yet look at a wardrobe with fear, as apposed to those children who use the method aren’t safe with the people who they are supposed to trust the most and use a wardrobe as a method of escape.

This conversation then moved on to the connotations of a bedroom, and the differences between the connotations of an adult’s bedroom and a child’s. How would an audience member feel if they were read extracts of a beloved children story, inter-mixed with the adult content of a book like 50 Shades of Grey?

As many of you will know the content within the book 50 Shades of Grey, written by E.L James, is quite obviously for adults. A parent would not allow one of their children to read this type of novel due to its content being ‘adult’. When reading 50 Shades of Grey, people don’t find content that easily relates to children, however when people read a child’s story they constantly search for a deeper meaning behind the text that can link to an adult’s lifestyle. Many people have analysed the tale of Alice in Wonderland in an attempt to do exactly that; to see if there is any deeper meaning to the text then it just being a child’s story.

As many people will already know the story was written by Charles Lutwig Dogson under the pseudonym Lewis Caroll. It is widely thought that Charles Dogson created the story Alice in Wonderland for the Liddel children who had a daughter named Alice, who was the youngest of three girls. “The theme with Alice growing and shrinking into different sizes could reflect the ups and downs of adolescence with young people sometimes feeling adult and sometimes quite the opposite” (Maata, 1997) which indicates that teenage thinking is really the confusion of having childish thoughts mixing together with new adult ones. “Some people have gone very far in their claims that Lewis Carroll wrote the stories while influenced by opium. They say the fifth chapter with the smoking Blue Caterpillar is about drugs.” (Maata, 1997) which is another indication of the adult world mixing with a child’s. It’s strange that a chapters of the book, which seem so colourful and suitable for the imagination of a child is considered to have been induced from the use of a drug. A drug being another thing that we would not expect to be present in a child’s world, in fact being behind the creation of a children’s story seems to be a rather confusing concept.

Perhaps in the moments in between being put to bed and getting out of it we could use a projector, coming from the wardrobe, showing clips of different children and adult films and programmes in order to highlight the differences between the two. It would seem to me that there is a generally accepted concept for a child’s bedroom and an adults bedroom, perhaps this mixing of the two would suggest a teenagers bedroom. Showcasing the in between time when a person is leaving behind their childhood, and becoming an adult, showing the confusion of thought that is often associated with that process.

Work Cited:

Etchells, T (1999) Endland Stories London: Pulp Faction

Maatta,Jerry, (1997) http://www.alice-in-wonderland.net/explain/alice841.html Sweden; March. (last accessed 8/4/2013)