Author: Tiffany Abatilda Thompson

Homely Home.

Tiffany Abatilda Thompson / / Home, Performance process, Rooms, West Parade

Many of have good and bad memories of home and different ideas on what home is and should be like. Home for me is feeling safe and comfortable with the people around me I love and care about. Also the feeling of being at home with items around you that gives you a sense of comfort such as, pictures, smells, certain ornaments and furniture. Many people don’t have that, children in care and homeless people on the street. Homeless people have nothing just a place where they can sit and sometimes take shelter from the cold and rain. Children in care have a home and shelter but does it feel like home not having parents or people they love around them.

The house on West Parade is a shabby neglected house with peeling wallpaper, shabby furniture and old decor, there’s no feeling of homeliness we should get in a house. It’s hard trying to adapt our feelings we all have of home into a house that looks so neglected.

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Living Room Wallpaper. 19/02/2013

‘Man can lock the door of his house from the inside, but he is not for that reason locked into his house’ (( Bollnow, O.F (2011) “Human Space” London: Hyphen Press p.147.)). Shutting a door in the house or knowing you have the door locked you feel so much safer, one can feel at ease and totally relax when they know they are ‘Free from attack’ ((Little, W (1969) “The Oxford Universal Dictionary” London: Oxford University Press. )).

‘Bare rooms have a chilling effect’ (( Bollnow, O.F (2011) “Human Space” London: Hyphen Press. P.144. )). The living room is the heart of the house where you can feel most safe, this is normally crowded with friends and family who sit and be social. The Living room feels warm and safe where you can relax and be yourself. Feeling at home is when you are around everyone and feeling safe also feeling that you belong somewhere. The living room on West parade is small, cold and hardly has any furniture this make’s the room un- homely as it doesn’t feel warm, cozy and safe like a living room should.

When in a session in the house just moving the furniture around so the sofa and chair facing the TV/middle of the room it felt a lot more homely.  Myself, Lauren and Sam were thinking about home and about the safety of it where your free from intrusion, but what if you were intruding in your own house? The thought of watching something you shouldn’t  such as peeping through a key hole, watching someone in the bath or watching someone getting changed. Are you safe in your home?  Having this idea and the idea that the TV center’s the living room, why don’t we put inappropriate things on TV to watch.

With the seed planted, i was thinking what if we had videos of people having a bath upstairs being streamed on to the TV downstairs, watching something so personal so openly in the living room where everyone gathers. In the bathroom in the bath or having a shower you are most vulnerable were you think you’re safe.

 

First Impressions.

Tiffany Abatilda Thompson / / Home, Uncategorized

Being in a house today has really opened my eyes to the wonders of theatre and art. Performing in a house has so much potential, with its intimacy and history of the property. There’s so many unique rooms with individual characteristics that would add to the performance. Being in a house limits our audience as we can only have twenty people in the house at one time, this makes the performance itself so intimate that it changes the dynamic of the performance.

Comparing to the norm of the theatre where you have an acting space and seating area there’s quite a distance between spectator and actor. However, being in a house changes this as there’s no specific place where audience are seated which changes the distance between the performers and the spectators this gives a different atmosphere to the performance itself.

After the session we had today looking around the house we can already see the potential of a brilliant performance. The house has CCTV in every room apart from the obvious bathroom areas, I like the idea of using CCTV as part as the performance as it give us more variety and could possibly expand our audience. We can use pre-recorded videos and stream them in the house or elsewhere.

Part of the session today was to find a room that we like and could potentially make a performance in; I chose the living room as you could do so much with it and had a personal connection with me. In the living room everything seems to happen, family gatherings, birthdays, Christmas, parties and so much more. A personal memory triggered me when I entered this room. I was only a child and thought I would surprise my mum after she went out to the pub with her boyfriend. So I waited up and when I heard them coming through the door I hid in the living room. I was going to jump out and surprise her. This was when I saw her boyfriend at the time physically abusing her being in that room it always reminded me of that night.

Some might think this inappropriate, but the reason why I put this on the blog was because not all nice things happen in such a happy area, and behind all those smiles and laughter something bad might just be hiding, covered by the ‘act’ we are forced to put on when inviting people into our home.

I had many ideas of performances that could occur in this room, one was man and wife sat in the living room sat watching a loop of their memories of Christmas, birthday’s, family gathering, parties etc. Whilst they are sat there with just blank expressions let the audience come in sit with them or stand watching them or the T.V.