Category: Performance process

“Seems I’m talking my whole life, it’s time I listen now”

Lauren Elizabeth Walker / / Home, Music / Sound, Performance process, Research

“Like his voice can’t deal with things it has to describe, That’s the thing you have to do with a voice after all – make it speak of the things you cannot deal with- makes it speak of the illegal ” ((Tim Etchells (1999). Certain Fragments. New york: Routledge. 98-176))

What if you take away all the voices? What if a performance has no words, no specific message and is completely open to the audience’s interpretation, but surely silence has meaning?

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bm_tTkHooZI 

In this you tube video, the university student talks about the value of silence and quotes her professor he describes how “Every individual structures their attitudes, beliefs, lifestyle, and behaviours around a theme. What is the life philosophy by which you live, and how has it shaped you as a person?” She goes on to say that her theme is the value of silence and of a quiet mind, she explains that “It’s something that I think is particularly relevant to modern youth, because the observation of silence is not something that our generation engages in enough” What happens when we explore the diversity and difficulty of silence in different situations? People like to focus on words and sounds, because they are comfortable words make a house feel homely. People are scared of silence, they are obsessed with noise they find it difficult to be alone to just shut the curtains; lock there doors. People are afraid because it is unfamiliar, when you isolate yourself there is no where to run.

She also says “I don’t think that practicing silence is necessary for observing silence. It has to do more with having a quiet mind than physically immersing oneself in silence” In our performance as our piece is a durational performance and we are going to have to have a quiet mind and physically immerse our self into our performance in silence.

Tim etchells talks about the meaning of silence, he made a list of silence of different situations

“ These are some examples of the list of silences

The kind of silence you sometimes get in phone calls to a person that you love.

The kind of silence people only dream of.

The kind of silence that follows a car crash.

The kind of silence between waves at the ocean”

Some examples that really interested me and relate to our room are…

“The kind of silence after a big argument

The kind of silence that only happens at night

The kind of silence is only for waiting in” ((Tim Etchells (1999). Certain Fragments. New york: Routledge. 98-176))

What if you took the kind of silence that is only for waiting in, and put it in a homely environment? Would that make the audience feel uncomfortable would they feel like there waiting for something? Our audience may feel that they are waiting for something to happen in our performance but it never does.

What if you left a room waiting?

“The atmosphere still retained the oppressiveness of a religious space; it seemed natural to speak in whispers. I felt my way along the corridor and opened the door at the end. The peeling paintwork of the synagogue was lit by warm yellow candlelight” ((Rachel Linchtenstein and Iain Sinclair (1999) Rodinsky’s Room: an excerpt http://www.artangel.org.uk//projects/1999/rodinsky_s_whitechapel/excerpt/excerpt (acessed: 10 April 2013)))

Rondinskys Room is story of what became of the reclusive Jewish scholar David Rondinsky, whose room at 19 Princlet street London was discovered undisturbed and had been left for 20 years after. As I was reading and researching into the story I found myself asking the question what silence would you call the silence of a room left alone to gather dust for 20 years be? Going on from what I was saying earlier about “the silence of waiting” I feel that this is the silence that applies to his room. When we go on holiday our house is waiting for us to come back, to make it home again. I feel that when I come home after being on holiday my house seems different smells different, sometimes even looks different we have to adjust ourselves to that space and learn to live in it again.  Rondinskys room was waiting for him to come back to come home but he never did, and was found by somebody else someone that it wasn’t familiar with. I feel that this added to the atomosphere in the room, and if we can create this kind of feeling for the audience in the living room it will be a very frightning and awkward situation for them to be in.

The ‘blinding’ performance

Andrew Tinley / / Documentation, Performance process, Research, Rooms

We use lighting all the time, whether it be to light up our house, to explore our surroundings or just simply to see. 

Has light become a mundane feature of our lives?

Anthony McCall’s light project You and I, Horizontal (2005), which was performed as an installation piece at the Hayward Gallery’s Light Show (2013) exhibition, explores the reality of light by literally showing the beams glaring across a plain black boxed studio room. These beams enabled audience members to change, adapt and become physically involved within the exhibition through being able to touch the rays and if felt the need stand in front of the light potentially creating moments of temporary darkness. Seeing as the projection was the only source of light in the room, the site appeared very surreal, this made the light, however slowly it moved the focal part of the performance. This changed the atmosphere and therefore took the conventional aid of light to another level.

Anthony McCall. You and I, Horizontal (III) (2007). Installation view at the Serpentine Gallery, London, 2007  _65575980_anthony_mccall
Left: Artnet Galleries: The Light Show (2013) Accessed 5th April 2013
Right: BBC News in pictures: The Light Show (2013) – Accessed 5th April 2013

This exhibition used familiar and simple materials and ingredients but combined them to present a new creation. During the exhibition different audience members perceived the light differently, some seemed to be afraid, some were quite confident. This unusual behaviour created a sense of unknowing and difference in perception. Anthony McCall tends to strip back the environment to the bare essentials and due to his previous work using film projection he has said to “deconstruct cinema by reducing film to its principle components of time and light and removing the screen entirely as the prescribed surface for projection” ((Artabase (2007) ‘Anthony McCall’, online: http://www.artabase.net/exhibition/1530-anthony-mccall (accessed 4th April 2013). )) To discover that this artist had begun his work in cinema suggests that his works perhaps create a type of narrative. These narratives, as seen also in You and I, Horizontal , can be as vague as an emotion or idea that becomes something potentially more substantial as the performance continues. The fact that the site of performance is stripped back of all the components means that the audience can focus primarily on the meaning of the performance and their own interpretation of what it may be. The fact that each audience members’ experience of this installation can be different is very exciting and has a similar desired outcome to my work in Safe House.

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Left: Tumblr; Anthony McCall (2013) – Accessed 3rd April 2013
Right: Anthony McCall: Installation view at Hangar Bicocca, Milan (2009) – Accessed 3rd April 2013

Anthony McCall’s “work in the Seventies had a more conceptual bent, nowadays McCall says that he wants to evoke the human figure — an effect underlined by the titles” ((Sooke, Alistair (2011) ‘Anthony McCall: Vertical Works, Ambika P3, London, review’, The Telegrpah, 4th March: p. 3. )  )) I feel as though his work evokes a potential abstract human essence within the space giving the site an unknowingly presence. Also I felt simultaneously that the art created a personal relationship with the audience through communication within the piece. This feature supported the personal individual response to the installation. I believe the real outcome of art is the response in which you have towards it. This reinforces the fact that the real piece of art, in this case, has intangible qualities which can rarely be shared from audience to audience.

The strange ability to touch the beams of light, due to a layer of aesthetic thin mist that filled the air, was a bizarre phenomenon. It felt as though the rules, conventions and traditional qualities of a light disappeared. The capability to see the beams for what they are and what they evoke inside of you as supposed to be used as a tool to view material vitalised the importance and the focus of the piece and therefore had a massive impact on your senses. Firstly your eyes were drawn to the projection. The focus on the room was very much the light but where in the room do you look? Do you wish to look on the wall where the light is projected or is there something about staring in to the hazy light that you would find appealing? Either way you look at this, separate performances appeared. For example as you stared in to the light you were ever so slightly blinded but due to the fact there were limited objects in the environment a feeling of harmony was achieved. Yes, occasional collisions occurred with other viewing audience members but all these emotions together created a sense of ‘a shared experience’. Another sense explored in this performance would be sound. The distorted sound of other audience members talking created quite an enjoyable backdrop to the performance. This sounds, however inaudible they were, made the piece feel connected with us as audience members as we could understand sections of text.


McCall, Anthony (2011) ‘Between You and I’, Ektoras Binikos, online: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RpBPgWZQCw (accessed 4th April 2013. )

This sense is something I wish my audience to experience in Safe House – the ability to share an experience in such close proximity with an audience member but at the same time it be evoking completely separate ideas and emotions.

The notion that the audience are in control of the outcome is a main theme throughout my performance and research and this, similarly in McCall’s works, enables viewers to experience an individual performance and take from it separate ideas and emotions. This is great when analysing audience responses and letting the piece evolve in to something bigger and potentially new throughout the future.

Sexual Fantasy

Lauren Simpson / / Performance process, Research, Rooms

The bedroom is typically thought of as a place for sleeping, dreaming and sexual activity. Combining all three in our performance will cause an interesting reaction. Sexual fantasy and dreaming is an interesting topic and very little is known about the relationship between them. Freud created the notion that all dreams could be considered to have sexual references within them; it is all down to the interpretation. However, not all psychologists share this view. “The typical male dreamer has 12 “sex dreams” per 100 dream reports.” ((Domhoff, G.William (1996) Finding Meaning in Dreams: A Quantitative Approach, New York: Plenum Publishing Corporation.)) This is a relatively high number, considering dreams are a fairly regular occurrence for most people. Freud “also claimed that much of dream imagery represents repressed sexual instincts or desires.” ((King, D, DeCicco, T, & Humphreys, T 2009, ‘Investigating sexual dream imagery in relation to daytime sexual behaviours and fantasies among Canadian university students’, Canadian Journal Of Human Sexuality, 18, 3, pp. 135-146.)) Therefore, presenting a male voyeur with a sexually charged situation has the potential to make them conscious of their sexual fantasies.

Our performance separates the sleeping element and the dream content. The audience member in the bed is put to ‘sleep’ while the voyeur has the sexual ‘dream’ revealed in front of them. This shows a distortion between dreaming and sex. They are relevant and they can exist in the same place but people might not always remember a dream or it might not have an obvious meaning. This will only have this effect if the voyeur is a male. Males are reported to be “more likely to dream of someone other than their current partner.” ((King, D, DeCicco, T, & Humphreys, T 2009, ‘Investigating sexual dream imagery in relation to daytime sexual behaviours and fantasies among Canadian university students’, Canadian Journal Of Human Sexuality, 18, 3, pp. 135-146.)) Therefore, it will still be as effective seeing a naked stranger or acquaintance as it would be to see their own partner. It could be considered to be more effective as they might feel like they should be repressing their reaction.

Another interesting point to monitor on performance day would be the audience member’s interactions with each other. The person in the bed will be completely oblivious to anything else that would have happened and so will have to be informed by the voyeur. The voyeur might be very descriptive when describing what happened, or they might become embarrassed and leave out important details.

This Item is of Great Value and Other Lies Told by Experts

Tom Briggs / / Performance process, Rooms

It is completely normal to want to have a thorough understanding of the world around us and the way that most of us do this is to create categories, to organise things by function, appearance or by any number of unknown criteria in order to form neat groups. This building of taxonomies is part of our everyday lives, in fact my initial response to our site was to break it up into three such groups, The ‘Simulator’ includes rooms that have been made to simulate the feeling of home without actually being inhabited, the ‘Office’ category applies to those rooms that have no illusion of home and exist only to facilitate the illusion of the rest of the house and finally the ‘Home’ which can be used to describe those rooms that were left untouched as the house became a simulator and as such retained the traces of a true home. Each room in the house was then placed into one these three categories by its function.

Here we have the first point of interest the way we express this categorisation is through our only universal form of communication, language. For Saussure “Nothing is distinct before language” (( De Saussure, Ferdinand (1974) Course in General Linguistics, New York: Fontana Collins, p.111-112 )) so that part of our perception of an object is tied up in how we can describe that same object. You can only distinguish between things than can be described to be different.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGlN_EaEgPQ

The clip above (( DuckPlumberThe2nd (2011) The Two Ronnies – The Confusing Library. Available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGlN_EaEgPQ (Accessed: 9th April 2013) )) is the heart wrenching tale of the compulsion to classify gone horribly wrong, the man is completely unable to find his book because of the monstrous disregard the librarian appears to have for a logical taxonomy (though it must be remembered it was in fact the architect’s idea). This fable does however raise some serious questions, why is it absurd to order books by colour, size or thickness? It seems it is all a matter context, which is a quite vague answer and definitely requires further scrutiny. The aim here then is to challenge the pattern of classification, to ask which criteria we choose and why. Why is it any less valid to be looking for a large green book than for The Twisted Spur?

The most obvious answer is that we define things by function because that is the most immediate way in which they will relate to us. How can I use this item? It does not matter to us what colour the item is if we currently need it to mash potatoes (unless of course you are an architect).

What happens then when an item is rediscovered? I.e it’s use is unknown, then it is a matter for the historian or archaeologist to place it in a taxonomy, the first step towards this is describing the item, here the job of the historian/archaeologist seems reasonably simple they must “articulate it into a description acceptable to everyone: confronted with the same entity, everyone will be able to give the same description; and, inversely, given such a description everyone will be able to recognise the individual identities that correspond to it” (( Foucault, Michel (1970) The Order of Thing, London: Routledge, p. 134 )) . Obviously there are huge challenges in creating universal taxonomy and Foucault further advises historians/archaeologists to describe using only what can be observed as fact or by use of “by analogies that must be of the utmost clarity” (( Foucault, Michel (1970) The Order of Thing, London: Routledge, p. 134 )) .Then we go back to Saussure to the idea of the sign, signifier, signified which relies, as Foucault observes, upon “the common affinity of things and language with representation” (( Foucault, Michel (1970) The Order of Thing, London: Routledge, p. 132 )) he continues however “things and language happen to be separate” (( Foucault, Michel (1970) The Order of Thing, London: Routledge, p. 132 )) .

It is here, the space between signifier and signified, in which we can successfully incorporate the performer, for it is his (my) job to take the idiosyncrasies of the world and expose them. So if we take the job of classification away from the so called expert (the historian/archaeologist) and hand it over to the performer (who then becomes the performer/historian/archaeologist) what might we discover?
Let’s start with something as simple as the category of ‘things that were found in this garden’. While that is what binds each and every one of my exhibits together, can there be more to it than that? What happens when we throw off this context, take those items out of their immediate context and place them somewhere else, somewhere neutral, a museum perhaps? What links those objects now? I (performer/historian/archaeologist) know that these objects originate in the same place but if the language that accompanies the exhibits, the language that is responsible for their context refuses to supply it, the audience is forced to make their own taxonomies of the seemingly disparate. What connects the bird feeder and the plug socket, the cigarette lighter and the hat stand? These are the questions the audience must be encouraged to ask, and then logically the nature of our classifications as a whole.

The exhibits are connected by one abstract factor, none the less they belong in the same category according to this particular performer/historian/archaeologist. This should then ask, in societies quest for order and definitive answers, what are the possibilities we overlook?

This shed is like the office or lab it is a place in which to retreat into thought, it is a shrine, the domain of the expert, the place where he plies his trade, makes his assumptions with divine tunnel vision. If, as Saussure assures us, there is no distinction without language then what effect do the lies/mistakes of the performer/historian/archaeologist have on the nature of the object? That we will have to find out in performance.

Secrets of the Lost Room

Samuel Davis / / Documentation, Home, Performance process, Research, West Parade

After extensive research and from information that I have gathered, I can speculate that the house on West Parade was where a commissionaire may have lived. We also know from council records and the house itself that it was built in 1932. The notion that the history of the space can influence and seed into a performance is something I became interested in.

Using this as a stimulus, I intend to use found texts to generate the feel of ‘the past’; receipts, photos, TV guides, stories, newspapers, mail, shopping lists and leaflets will build up an extensive amount of material. My aim is that this will make it impossible for the audience to gather a full picture of what any of it means. This ambiguity is not to confuse or trick the audience but to create the feel of a room that has been left untouched for many years. If someone were to open it, they would have to sift through the material to work out what happened in the space. Rather than looking for what has happened in the space, it is instead what hasn’t happened here – ‘things’ haven’t been thrown away.

This has largely been influenced by a guidebook called Rodinsky’s Whitechapel – this guides readers around London’s Jewish East End.

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“Workmen refurbishing one of Spitalfields historic buildings have revealed a twenty year old secret. They have uncovered a lost room in a weaver’s attic room on Princelet Street. The room was the home of a reclusive Jew called David Rodinsky.” ((Lichtenstein, R. (1999). Rodinsky’s Whitechapel. London, Artangel.))

This exposed and ‘lost’ room had been an undiscovered time capsule for over 20 years; a thick layer of dust, spectacles, a cup of tea and a pan of porridge left on a stove were just some of the objects that had been left in 1969 when Rodinsky suddenly disappeared. A plethora of his work, personal and miscellaneous objects were scattered in the attic room.

rodinskysroom
A photo showing Rodinsky’s Room as it was found in 1980. ((Forum.casebook.org (2012) East End Photographs and Drawings – Page 122 – Casebook Forums. [online] Available at: http://forum.casebook.org/showthread.php?p=63682 [Accessed: 7 Apr 2013].))

Rodinsky was known by the locals at the time and some people from the street even grew up with him as a child. Lichtenstein herself had a direct connection to Princelet Street as she was the granddaughter of Polish immigrants who had settled there in the 1930s. She became obsessed with Rodinsky, trying to find out who this man was and why he mysteriously vanished in 1969 “Overtime, my obsession with the story grew. I began to excavate the boxed-up remains in his room. At first this arbitrary archaeology revealed little, the objects seemingly mute with the loss of their originators voice. But slowly, through careful examination of his vast collection a faint image of a man began to emerge” ((Lichtenstein, R. (1999). Rodinsky’s Whitechapel. London, Artangel.))

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Photograph: Rachel Lichtenstein – A to Z taken from Rodinsky’s Room. ((Lichtenstein, R. (1999) AtoZ. [image online] Available at: http://www.rachellichtenstein.com/content/rodinsky%E2%80%99s-whitechapel-1999 [Accessed: Sunday 7th April 2013].))

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Photograph: Rachel Lichtenstein – A note found in Rodinsky’s Room. ((Lichtenstein, R. (2013) Note found in Rodinsky’s room.. [image online] Available at: http://www.artangel.org.uk/projects/1999/rodinsky_s_whitechapel/statements/michael_morris [Accessed: Sunday 7th April 2013].))

Her growing obsession and personal relationship with the Jewish East End led Lichtenstein to create her own art and performances from it.  The huge amount of detritus she collected from a seemingly mysterious man formed part of these performances and art; this was reflected in her performances that were “themselves broken in nature”. ((Guardian, T. (1999) The lost spirit of Spitalfields. The Guardian, [online] 22 May. Available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/1999/may/22/books.guardianreview9 [Accessed: Sunday 7th April 2013].))

Lichtenstein never managed to figure out exactly what Rodinsky was like. She had often heard conflicting and contradicting memories from people who knew him “He was, according to different witnesses, both very short and very tall. He was backward and he was a genius. He was rich and he was poor. He was painfully shy and he entertained others by playing the spoons in a local cafe. He was clean-shaven and he was bearded. There was no photo of him. At times he seemed like a man who did not exist.” ((Guardian, T. (1999) The lost spirit of Spitalfields. The Guardian, [online] 22 May. Available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/1999/may/22/books.guardianreview9 [Accessed: Sunday 7th April 2013].)) Comparatively, our own performance is similar as I intend to gather a mixture of found texts that will not expose a specific event that has occurred. Of course, with the amount of material filling the space, it will perhaps create a broad and vague sense that something has happened in the space; something has happened, but no-one will know what. Currently in the space we are frozen and still, this sense of being frozen in time links to Rodinsky’s room on Princelet Street as it remained frozen for over two decades. What happens when a space that is frozen, still, motionless and unmoving is injected with bodies? This very notion is something I am going to explore, there will not only be these scraps of detritus and junk but a living presence that contrasts against this sense of a neglected static space.

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Our own detritus and material that has been collected. Photograph by Sam Davis

As mentioned earlier, Lichtenstein used “arbitrary archaeology” ((Guardian, T. (1999) The lost spirit of Spitalfields. The Guardian, [online] 22 May. Available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/1999/may/22/books.guardianreview9 [Accessed: Sunday 7th April 2013].)) to uncover the material in Rodinsky’s room. A similar occurrence will happen in the house on West Parade, there will be no direct connection between one object and the next.

Rodinskys Grave

David Rodinsky’s headstone, 1999. Photograph by Rachel Lichtenstein