Author: Tiffany Abatilda Thompson

And it’s over…

Tiffany Abatilda Thompson / / 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 1-4th 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.

Testing Testing..

Tiffany Abatilda Thompson / / Performance process

In today’s session we had 3 first years coming in at allocated slots to come view the performance. As our performance is in 3 weeks we felt this session was crucial as we could trial our ideas and hopefully get feedback afterwards.

 

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Performance Set Up West Parade
 

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Performance Set up 16/04/2013

The first 2 people arrived as a pair and came into our space, I and Sam beforehand prepared the space with the materials we had and got into position. With the pair of us being still my only concern was keeping still and making our performance message and intentions clear to the audience.

When the two first years arrived they got told to sit either side of me on the sofa. The pair had mixed reviews on what they had to do after they had sit down, One of them just sat there for a minute taking everything in and the other was constantly questioning what they had to do. As well as this, the pair tried interacting with us both, not knowing we wasn’t going to respond. As I was in the middle of them both I realised how unfocused I was, I kept corpsing which I realise now is something I need to work on. The first years wanted to get up and look around which I found interesting then it suddenly dawned on me that only one of the pair would be with us on the actual performance and then made me wonder what one of them would be like just on their own. Would they still try to interact? Or would they just sit there. After ten minutes was up the white rabbit came in and took the audience members away into her room.

Half an hour later a new spectator arrived to come see the house. When he entered the living room I felt I different atmosphere and when I realised he was on his own I knew this was going to be a completely different performance than the pair that we just had in. This spectator didn’t interact, didn’t talk he just sat there watching the T.V. This was a lot easier as I could just get completely focused on what I was performing.

At the end of the session I met up with the three spectators and asked for feedback and what they got from the performance in the living room, I had an interesting response. The first two said that it was weird and it took them a while to figure out what actually was the performance and said when they realised that the message of our performance was clear. The spectator that came on his own got the message straight away and thought that the performance was good and it was clear.

What I got from them watching the performance is that we need more leaflets, newspaper, junk mail and more lists for the audience to look at. We need to fill the space and make it look more extreme to make the performance become clearer on what we are trying to show.

Façade

Tiffany Abatilda Thompson / / Home, Performance process, Rooms, Uncategorized

“A Division between spaces that are used as a façade, and other spaces where a personal, hidden life takes place” ((Rechavi B. Taylor (2009) ‘A room for living: Private and public aspects in the experience of a living room’,A journal of environmental psychology, 29 (1) March: pp. 133-143.  P.133.)). I would consider the living room to be less private out of all the rooms in a house, we always invite our guests into this room as it’s the most socially acceptable. “The living room, as such, is not where more secretive or personal aspects of the dweller manifests themselves” ((ibid, p. 134.)) that is left for the more intimate spaces such as the bedroom. In the Living room we tend to show off and perform a different face of reality, a mere perfect imitation of it when we have people around. Why do we do this? Do we do this to pretend we live in a perfect world?

We dress our living rooms on how we interpret our vision of home and the feeling of homeliness. Also, different people have different visions of home and what that looks like. As well as this, you can tell a lot about the person living there with how the living room is presented and styled. For example, if a person is disabled and or in a wheelchair the living room and house would be set out in a way where a wheelchair could navigate around easily.
I feel like our performance in the living room is a facade as we are showing the living rooms true face of reality. Whether we are on our own, with family or people we are comfortable with we tend to show a horrible side of reality that we are not sociable anymore and if we are it’s through virtual devices and in our performance we show this.

Are you a Hoarder?

Tiffany Abatilda Thompson / / Home, Performance process, Research

Over time we accumulate things and memories from our past and present such as; letters, photos, birthday cards, invitations etc. We then become stuck in a rut with not being able to throw them away because the sentimental value they have. In my own room at university I’ve filled it with photos, teddies and pointless objects that remind me of home, by doing this it has cluttered my room but I can’t seem to take thing’s back home to un-clutter it. Without these things in my room I’m reminded that I’m not at home just a room 50 miles from home.

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My Photo Wall: 155 West Parade
Reading Rodinsky’s Room and finding out what was left in his place after he disappeared in the 1960’s then reopened 20 years later we see the life he had by the objects he collected over the years. When the room was finally opened “Every space overflowed with books on subjects ranging from the Talmud to the study of Hieroglyphics”  (( Lichtenstein, Rachel (1999) Rodinsky’s Room, London: Grantab Books. p. 11 )).Rodinsky was an intelligent man that taught himself language’s that isn’t known now.

With our performance we thought of filling the space to show the audience that the space has been lived in, in such a dead room. Similarly, with us being still in a room covered and filled with memories and documents gives away clues to what sort of people we are. We want the audience to feel like they haven’t seen everything when they think they have.

The Void.

Tiffany Abatilda Thompson / / Performance process, Uncategorized

The TV now plays a big part in our homes; it’s what centers our lives as well as social media. If we’re not catching the latest episode of ‘Embarrassing Bodies’ or watching the new Nicki Minaj music video then we’re not cool. TV has ruined our world, we all become hypnotized by the box and not engaging or socializing with family and/or friend’s we live with. This is making the living room feel like there’s no life as everyone is just in a trance, making it go back to what the living room originally was used for and being “The living dead room” (( Heathcote, E (2012) The Meaning of Home London:Frances Lincoln.)).

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Photo Taken:  05/03/2013  credit to: Libby Soper.

With the living room normally been left for best and for when visitors came, now we take the space for granted. These spaces used to have laughter music and life, now all we have is lifeless people staring into a void of nothingness.

With being in the living room we expanded our idea of us doing what we normally do in the living room and take it to the extreme so it points out to the audience just how much we sit stare and do nothing. What happens if we take the norm to an extreme?  In today’s session we played around with the idea myself, Lauren and Sam all took different positions in the living room facing the TV which had a paused image on the screen. Adding to this we all had a still position that we would keep for an hour to get the Spectator’s reaction, fellow peers came in and sat down and after they experienced this we approached them to see what they felt and they said they felt uneasy and that the living room had a different atmosphere.

To develop the idea of making the norm into the only thing we do with the world living around us with the pizza boxes and the booze bottles on the floor to show that the room has been lived in and that the room had life.