Category: Research

It’s okay, this has been done before.
…this however, is our first time.

Lauren Bethany Elouise Watson / / Documentation, Research, Rooms

Hotel Medea (2011) CHAPTER II – DRYLANDS –. Online, http://vimeo.com/18224931 (accessed 24 February 2013).

Hotel Medea “allow for a participatory, immersive and interactive perspective of the theatrical event” ((Hotel Medea (2011) Hotel Medea Online: http://vimeo.com/hotelmedea (accessed 24 February 2013). )) within their work, and it is this immersive and interactive experience which we are trying to create, for both audience members, despite the fact the two audience members will never experience both performances. An example of Hotel Medea’s immersive theatre is their performance, Drylands.

In this durational evening performance, the audience became part of, and were offered an intimate part within the performance and it is this immersive, intimate and safe atmosphere which we are trying to inhabit in the bedroom. The experience will still be immersive for the cupboard…but not necessary safe.

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Lauren Watson. Date taken: 22 March 2013.

As well as immersing the audience in the piece with spoken narratives and bed-time rituals, the room itself has been decorated and transformed by children’s drawings and paintings. The child’s room is safe and secure, with all the usual sexual context of the bedroom removed. We needed this essence of innocent and safety to be in the bedroom, as the cupboard which is built into the main wall holds none of these values. It subverts them, showing the true and heightened nature of what we associate with the bedroom. There is no safety or comfort to be found in the cupboard. You will find no bedtime story or hot chocolate to send you off to sleep to “the place in which we are allowed to dream” ((Heathcote, Edwin (2012) The Meaning of Home, London: Frances Lincoln Ltd., p. 76.)).  What you will find is a narrative made to confuse, question and attempt to control you. It will put you in a position you would rather not be in, try and escape from, a place in which you wouldn’t want to stay.

“The remnants of site-specific performance can be extensive. It generates documents relating both the creation of performance and to the engagement with site before, during and after the event” ((Pearson, Mike (2010) Site-Specific Performance, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 191.)).

To let these two simultaneous events go undocumented would be a loss on our part as performers. The documentation “made during…often assert themselves to be the true record of what really happened, or else we ascribe that capacity to them” ((Pearson, Mike (2010) Site-Specific Performance, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 191-192.)), to be able to look back on what it felt like, and how we made people feel would  ensure that we would not lose the performance entirely after the performance had finished. How many performances have you been to which take place in a house? And how many had you wished you’d been to? With documentation you would be given the chance to glimpse into the world we had created in our ‘safe house’.

“Site-specific performance as an unlikely and fleeting moment in history of a place, known only through the  traveller’s [or audiences’] tales of those present” ((Pearson, Mike (2010) Site-Specific Performance, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 194.)).

Could we, as performer, document the performance and reactions during the periods in the performance where there were no audience members or visitors in our room? To have a note-pad and pen hidden in our space, at hand to record emotions, feelings, reflections and reactions would be invaluable.

Writing by tainted light, struggling to hold the pen in our greasy hands, struggling to move and see due to restraints. This would make the documentation as much part of the performance as we are. A living, breathing, active part of the performance. Just a part which no audience members will witness.

Becoming Invisible: CCTV but in a new light

Faye Rose Mcdool / / CCTV, Performance process, Research

We enjoyed the idea of revealing a message, however, we thought we could be more creative with this take more advantage of using the CCTV during different times during the day. The title of the Site Specific piece is ‘Safe House’ so we began to question two people where they are most comfortable in their house/flat student accommodation.

We questioned this because, like in the Safe House, we are not permanent residents but we are simply there temporarily and can get attached to one room. Like the two on the video getting attached with their bedrooms, we are most comfortable in the CCTV room as that is where we spend most of our time during rehearsals.

From getting this information, we wanted to challenge the meaning of Safe House and making the audience feel uncomfortable when watching our pre-recorded footage. The definition of Safe House is “a dwelling or building whose conventional appearance makes it a safe or inconspicuous place for hiding, taking refuge, or carrying on clandestine activities.” ((Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineer IEEE: Dictionary.com, “safe house,” in Collins English Dictionary – Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition. Source location: HarperCollins Publishers.http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/safe house. Available:http://dictionary.reference.com. Accessed: March 26, 2013)) . We wanted to take the aspect of hiding in the house so we have played around with using darkness with the CCTV. To do this, we film inside the house at night time. Doing this was interesting because we all of a sudden felt a sense of fear of going through the house just because of the darkness and due to being unfamiliar with the other rooms. Over the top of the recordings, we have found quotes for various books to describe the thoughts and feeling of being invisible in the darkness.

We looked at “The Invisible Man” By Ralph Ellison which expresses the thoughts and feelings of an African man in society and how he feels invisible compared to the rest of his society in the twentieth century.  “I am a man of substance of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids” ((Ellison, Ralph, 1947 The Invisible Man,  Penguin Books, New York p7)) . Using this would link wonderfully without CCTV recordings as you can see a silhouette of a body during the footage but only when the body is moving or light shone on them you notive there is a human there. We looked at other books to find this sense of hiding and invisibility:

  • The Invisible actor By Yoshi Oida & Lorna Marshall ((Oida, Yoshi. Marshall, Lorna 1997, The Invisible Actor. Cox & Wyman, Reading Berkshire))
  • How I Became Invisible By David Rattray ((Rattray, David 1993 How I Became Invisible , Semiotext,U.S.: Central Bks))

Among quotes from these texts, we created our own words to record and say over the footage for the final edit for the video to create a narrative. We edited the text also to focus it on feminist views instead so we could connect more with the text we had found and going to write.

When creating this, I also realised how much in common it has with my own work of Liminal, Compact and Ignored spaces and the sense of hiding but wanted to be seen in the space. Because of this, I have decided to place some of this work in the CCTV room on the cord board along with the pre-recorded CCTV video.

The Difficulty of Fiction

Samuel Mant / / Performance process, Research

So here I stand, in my gallery (well, that’s a lie, here I sit at a computer screen in the library, but since my piece is based around the idea of perpetuating the fiction of what things are not, then this is fairly appropriate. Let’s close our eyes and imagine I’m in my gallery. Then open them again so that you can read this post. There, that’s better).

Before me lie quite a few things – mundane things, everyday, if we look at them with our eyes. Here’s one now:

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‘Isolation and immobility, then, are the two conditions the imagination requires if it is to be preserved from the ruinous distractions or ‘invasions’ of reality.’ (1977, pp., 41)

Certainly, this applies in the creation of my mythologies, if I write within the gallery, in a place I have re-appropriated as an escapist sanctuary for the purposes of performance anyway, my work is generally more productive, though sometimes the sheer banality of the place works against me. Immobility, too, helps the imagination – my imagination anyway. Blindfolded and tucked away into my little sleeping-ledge it is sometimes easier to let my mind drift and adapt pre-existing pieces of narrative. Isolation though, works not only for me, but for the audience of my piece – the last thing I want in my gallery are the ‘invasions of reality’ as Sturrock puts it. While it helps that the living room tends to be silent as the grave, the space itself has a Spartan cell-like feel to it (indeed, one of my first ideas for performance in there was of me portraying a prisoner within these monastic confines, but the rationale was never truly there) which can only accentuate feelings of isolation from reality. The grate down near the floor that allows a link to reality outside the house seems only to increase feelings of isolation, since even though you have a link to the outside, you feel even more withdrawn from it somehow.

Currently, I still have a couple more narratives to write fully but I have forsaken some last sessions within the gallery to visit home (ridiculous, I know!). I wonder if I will still be able to create absorbing legends when I don’t have access to the isolation and immobility the gallery can provide to me. I worry that my current narratives will deteriorate over time and not cling to the meaning they once held, or never held at all. I wrestle with the idea that meaning is fluid or completely unnecessary and that all I provide as the blind curator is an alternative viewing of the real, wrapping it in the fictional, the escapist. However, in the end, it may just be out of control – reading Borges own works of fiction, I am struck by this particular passage from The Library of Babel in relation to my own worries about the contents of my gallery:

‘Man, the imperfect librarian, may be the product of chance or of malevolent demiurgi; the universe, with its elegant endowment of shelves, of enigmatical volumes of inexhaustible stairways for the traveller and latrines for the seated librarian, can only be the work of a god.’ (1964, pp., 79)

Now, I cannot knowingly cite my gallery as the work of a divine entity, but this passage shows me that ownership of the gallery is not mine, not even close – it exists ab aeterno and will show me in time what it wants to say.

References:

Borges, J. L., 1964. Labyrinths. Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd.

Sturrock, J., 1977. Paper Tigers: The ideal fictions of Jorge Luis Borges. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

She Looks Back.

Lauren Bethany Elouise Watson / / Documentation, Performance process, Research, Rooms

“As in life, actors need to be aware when staring at others is and is not appropriate” ((Schiffman, Jean (2005) ‘Eye to Eye’, Back Stage West, XII (22), 1531572X, May: N.P.)).

Eye contact in performance is vital. It establishes relationships between performers whilst also forming a relationship between the audience and performer/s. But what happens when this eye contact deconstructs or challenges a pre-established relationship? Forced or prolonged eye contact alters the dynamics of a performance, often leaving either recipient or instigator feeling uncomfortable, scrutinised or even exposed.

In our performance, it this surprisingly, usually easy and expected convention of the theatre that is  becoming our biggest fear and ask.

“In the theatre, gesture appears typically in conjunction with spoken text, underlining, undermining or counterpointing it” ((Scolnicov, Hanna (2010) ‘Stripping as Gesture’, ASSAPH: Section C: Studies in the Theatre, XXIV, pp. 139-152, p. 140.)), however, in our performance we are playing with this convention. Subverting it, almost. The eye contact happens in silence. The performer is unable to speak, yet the eye contact becomes justified and essential. To hold eye contact is to hold the power within the scene or scenario. But when this scene is subverted, the eye contact becomes a challenge in itself. To create power where there was none through eye contact is an intimidating task, and to subvert a strong, dominating relationship through eye contact alone is empowering.

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Witness, UCLA (2011). Counesy of Allison Wyper.’Witness: Notes from the Artist’, Platform, VI (1), pp. 57-76, p.62.

When we are hidden behind the blindfold, we become an object to be viewed. Aspects of the ‘actor’ are stripped away, and we become a possession, as “beneath the mask the actor hides not merely his face but also his identity” ((Scolnicov, Hanna (2010) ‘Stripping as Gesture’, ASSAPH: Section C: Studies in the Theatre, XXIV, pp. 139-152, p. 142.)). The audience  knows us on merely an aesthetic level. A possession to be viewed. Although the identity of the performer is not known, the scene presented to the audience is still an intimate one. “Looking at someone is almost like touching them” ((Schiffman, Jean (2005) ‘Eye to Eye’, Back Stage West, XII (22), 1531572X, May: N.P.)), and when that person has no power to look back, this notion of touching them is heightened.

To subvert this power balance without the use of direct address is really an electric moment. “To deconstruct language is to deconstruct gender; to subvert the symbolic order is to subvert sexual difference” ((Showalter, Elaine (1989) Speaking of Gender, London and New York: Routledge, p. 3.)). Suddenly, through the abandon of language, our sexual difference has been subverted, with all the power handed over to us, the exposed performer. This “female self-unveiling substitutes power for castration” ((Showalter, Elaine (1992) Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siecle London: Virago Press, p. 156.)), castrating the voyeur (if male), removing all previous power he held. When we remove our blindfold, the male gaze becomes scrutinised and challenged and abhorred.

This transference of power, and a ‘one-on-one’ audience/performer situation is similar to Allison Wyper’s Witness (2010-2011). Witness is a “participatory performance for one audience member at a time in which the viewer is configured as accomplice to the performance event, a ritual in which power is borrowed, trafficked, and stolen” ((Wyper, Allison (2011) ‘Witness: Notes from the Artist’, Platform, VI (1), pp. 57-76, p.57.)). By participating in this transition of power and status, we make ourselves vulnerable, and question where we stand within the performance.

 “As we watch others we are also conscious of being watched” ((Wyper, Allison (2011) ‘Witness: Notes from the Artist’, Platform, VI (1), pp. 57-76, p.62.)).

The behaviour of both performer and voyeur changes throughout the performance. Although first making eye contact is intimidating and scary, once our gaze restored, the power balance shifts. Suddenly, the object looks back and takes on a persona. Challenging the roaming gaze of the voyeur. In our practical sessions, the voyeur has held our gaze. This is either out of respect or fear. Fear to be seen looking at you naked and totally exposed, but also because you are owed respect.

Performance writing

Lauren Elizabeth Walker / / Documentation, Performance process, Research, Uncategorized

Previously in our performance in the living room, we decided to have a video with 5 minute sections of different films and bits of CCTV footage constantly playing as the audience sit in our space. As we watched tapes about home, and privacy such as ‘rear window’ and ‘life is sweet’ we instantly found ourselves asking the question ‘who is that actor?’. This gave us an idea about coming up with different characters and playing with the idea of “who’s that?” Each of us came up with characters of our own some real and some made up. An example of one of my characters is
Julie key – Elvis Presley’s secret daughter he had by having an affair with the presidents wife.
We then expanded this idea by incorporating the pizza boxes we have been using and writing on them asking questions to each other about our audience member, we tested this with an audience member and the reactions that we got were really interesting. They said that they felt like they were being talked about, which made them want to know what was being said about them. One idea that I have had since having an audience member, is to never show them the box so they will go away wondering what we have written about them, so they go away not knowing and will always wonder what was said. Or we could go a totally opposite way and show them what we have written about them, they won’t fully understand but there’s something interesting about the fact that they will never really understand what it means and will always wonder who the character is and why we related that character to them. Another idea is that each of the performers have a sign or a label on them, saying there name or a made up name. Or something personal about us, giving the audience member an insight into us as people. An example of this is in the picture below which I have taken from “Certain Fragments” written by Tim Etchells.

Michael living a lie.
“Tim Etchells” Certain Fragments Section 2 Performance text.

When reading the section on performance I had a lot of ideas for us to incorporate his work into ours. “Writing for performance doesn’t necessarily have to be a script it can be a range of different types of writing for example- a text of half remembered songs, a text for a megaphone, love letters, posters, emails or a text of nonsense”. ((Caroline moore. (2012). On performance writing. Available: http://worldtheatre2.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/on-performance-writing-tim-etchells/. Last accessed 17/03/2013.)) Text of nonsense really interested me, the idea that what we write on the pizza boxes or maybe even signs on the wall covered in made up words, no punctuation or even a made up language on them, or even in a different language all together. Maybe even shapes and pictures that don’t mean anything. We will know what we have said about them but the audience will never unless they look it up after the performance. This idea is carrying on from earlier, the idea that the performance carries on even after it has finished. We could even ask the audience to write something on the boxes, asking them to write their thoughts about home or even make their own character so we as performers take something away from each audience member. In the last section I experimented as we sat in the space by taking a pizza box and just writing the first things that came to my head by the end of the session I had covered the whole box. I would like to do more of this because the writing I wrote, even though it didnt really make any sense was really interesting and could be incorporated into our performance.