Category: Rooms

How do you create a home?

Hayley Misseldine / / Home, Performance process, Research, Rooms, West Parade

When I first stepped into the house that was to become our temporary home for the first time, despite the fact that it wasn’t so aesthetically pleasing, I couldn’t help but feel oddly comforted, for one it reminds me of the house I currently reside at in Lincoln, and two, its emptiness calls out to me. I see an empty space, and instantly all I want to do is decorate it, to make it feel ‘homey’ and it wasn’t until I visited this house on West Parade that I realised how strong this desire seems to be.

‘What does homeliness mean and how is it created?’ ((Bollnow, Otto, (2011) Human Space, Hyphen Press.)) To me, a house is not a home until it looks like one. This definition of how a house exactly can look like a home is up to the inhabitants, but you notice different examples in every home you have ever visited. You notice small objects, whether they are photographs, sentimental objects, even the decor, they all add up to make a space feel like a home, it feels like someone lives there. On the other hand there are homes which infact are inhabited, but it feels neglected, this is the case with the house on West Parade – it is set up this way, it is meant to feel like whomever lives there do not lead a happy home life, which brings me to my next point – home is not just about how it looks, it is also about who live there.

Personally, I can’t feel at home unless I am living with someone I am close to, family or friends, I won’t feel at home with strangers. It took several months for me to feel at home in Lincoln at first, due to the fact that the people I was living with were not close to me. Though contrary to how I felt in Lincoln, it was a different case when I lived in London for a month, I lived in a large house with 15 other people, and within the first week we had all grown close and made great connections, so in result I felt at home marginally faster than I have done here. In theory it comes down to human connection, ‘Home is wherever I’m with you’. ((Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zero’s (2009) Home, Vagrant Records))

So this house, that we will work in for the next 5 months – will it become a home? Or will it become something else entirely? Thinking of all the possibilities this house possesses, especially knowing that there is a CCTV camera in almost every room, is quite daunting. There is so much we could do, we could – judging from some of the rooms interiors go to some dark places, the cot room for example, has got to be one of the creepiest and most unnerving rooms I have ever been in. Just from a simple piece of furniture and absolutely nothing else, makes the room practically scream neglect at you. The only room in the house I felt semi-comfortable in was the living room, and only because of the furniture, take that away and it would become just as uncomfortable as the other rooms. This proves my point – to make a house feel even remotely like a home, you need comforting objects inside of it, and you need people who care for one another, otherwise all you have left is a building.

Moving Out

Angela Michelle Graham / / Rooms

Well that was an exciting four days!!! Thanks to all those that came and supported our little family, as well as the council for allowing us to use such a diverse and interesting space, but mostly thank god it’s over.

Although having explored new ways of reacting to space that I would never have expected, and finding myself trapped within the web of life, I feel as if I am free from the mad house. I would not mind popping back for tea with the white rabbit or cheeky chat in the bathroom with Jozey, but after how me and the cot room left it I do not feel as if I would enjoy going back there.  Marina Abramovic states her works were based on discrepancies in perception: “You hear something but you see something else” (( Biesenbach, K. 2010, Marina Abramović. New York: Museum of Modern Art, p.14.)) and I feel I achieved this with sharp angular lines of wool countered by my softly spoken poem by Nicole Brossard. I have taken a lot of inspiration for my piece from Marina Abramovic, which may sound unlikely as many of her pieces include a lack of concern for the safety of herself, but the level of focus she demonstrates in pieces such as The Artist is Present in which she sat perfectly still in The Museum of Modern Art in New York from open to close, can be compared to my (although considerably shorter) focus with which I trace the wool.

In retrospect if I had not had the limitations of not being able to change the room’s cosmetics and having a budget I would have removed the carpet (as I am now sporting some lovely  carpet burns) as it ruined the silence and quiet of the room. I would also have not been performing at the same time as the kitchen group because of how well sound carried through the walls. Although Libby is a beautiful singer, hearing her sing One Direction whilst I was slowly tracing the threads and whispering was not the best thing that could have happened. Albeit I managed to change the rooms aesthetic by creating my web and setting lights that projected the shadows of me and the threads across the far wall by the door. I feel the shadows gave the piece a more transcendent feel  and as Edward Gordon Craig states “The masking effect of shadows… were designed to raise the action to this elemental but abstract plane” ((Innes, C. 1998, Edward Gordon Craig. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Harwood Academic Publishers, p.93.)) if I could have I would have put these lights on the other side of the room to project the shadows against the cot and the wall behind it but due to limitations of space I could not.

I feel the house worked well with people being separated and reunited throughout the piece and every room having a different feel with one audience member commenting that “each room had its own smell” . I feel that each room allowed the audience member to take something different from it another audience member  commented she “enjoyed the diverse nature of the rooms, and how each room had a different feeling and emotion. Leaving me feeling drained as I left the safe house to return home” This fills me with confidence that our group managed to achieve something unique, individual and the likes Lincoln has never seen before. I hope we left all those that came to watch wanting more.

Talking Through Tactility

Samuel Mant / / Performance process, Research, Rooms

Everywhere we explore, we explore with our eyes (that is, those of us lucky enough to have eyes). As humans, our primary sense is sight and we define the world around us through vision – everything has to be seen to be believed, after all. Our reliance on visual interaction is doubly apparent when our ability to see is impaired – every single human being has been scared in or by the dark, partly due to the intrinsic fear of the unknown (which our eyes abate by making it known) and also in part due to our inability to see.

What can we do when sight is denied to us? One of the first instinctive reactions is to thrust out one’s arms and use a bizarre shuffling gait to move around. We try to feel the world around us and it is that instinct, that reaction that I want to examine.

Our eyes deny us the opportunity and motive for tactile exploration – basic human reliance on sight does away with the need to feel the world around you. But how do we cope when we must explore a place physically? What happens when you only know somewhere by touch.

In the house, in the little ante-room beside the living room, I posed myself these two questions. Blindfolding myself with my scarf, I set about discovering the space with a new pair of eyes – my hands. I was inspired, in no small part, by the work of Mark Wayman, who’s work centres around the idea of the disembodied narrative – as the South London gallery’s website describes it, ‘Monologues, describing the surfaces and architectural features of the room in minute and accurate detail, are delivered by Wayman from hidden or obscured locations within it.’ While this does key in to some of my performative ideas that are brewing (or rather, since this post has been delayed for a while, have already come to fruition), my main inspiration comes from his one-off performance wherein he took a small audience round a secluded garden while blindfolded and described the space in minute detail, entirely from memory.

Mark Wayman describing the minutiae of the garden.

I have attempted this within my little ante-room, with favourable results. Once I was free from the yoke of sight, I could (after a fashion) quite easily explore the space, learning the size of things, the room in which I had to move, the texture of different parts of the walls, different parts of the floor. If I stood still, I could become aware of the draft from the little portcullis over near the floor. The heat (or lack thereof) that denoted certain areas was fascinating; with my hands I could judge a thermal map of the room, finding places where the chill was especially strong, the wall directly opposite the draft. Even in the darkness of the blind, the size, shape and layout of this room became as clear to me as it would be if I used my eyes. While blind, I could become part of a space – so intrinsically linked with the proximity of knowledge (for when tactility is your main means of discovery, being close to your surroundings is inevitably) that I could almost become a feature of it. In performance, I want to be part of this space, not merely some inhabitant of it.

REFERENCES:

http://www.liveartwork.com/dvd/current%20issue3.htm (Picture, accessed 22/03/13)

http://www.southlondongallery.org/page/mark-wayman-shifter (Quotation, accessed 22/03/13)

People specific performance.

Jozey Wade / / Documentation, Home, Performance process, Rooms, Uncategorized

The house
Photo taken 01/02/2013 by Jozey Wade

When I first set foot in the bathroom of our house, back in January, I wrote in my many scribblings of notes (some of which can be seen below) that I was drawn to it because of the privacy, safety and solitude attached to it. I don’t think, on that first day, I could have possibly imagined the journey I would go on in that small room. Not only in relation to what I would learn about bathrooms, but also – and more importantly – about human nature, and even myself.

Performance Process
Photo taken 05/02/2013 by Jozey Wade

I spent a lot of time in the first stages of my process deliberating on what I could wear in the bath to cover my modesty and yet remain true to the site and performance. I did not want to wear clothes, just for the sake of being covered if t didn’t make any sense – of course, in the bath we are generally always naked. I came to the decision of being naked without much though of what it might mean for me and it was only once I started putting it into practice, particularly in front of others, that I began to find it difficult and feel uncomfortable about the prospect. “To be naked is to be deprived of our clothes and the word implies some of the embarrassment which most of us feel in that condition. The word nude, on the other hand, carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone.” ((Kountouriotis, P. (2009) ‘Nudity, nakedness, otherness and a “still difficult spectator”‘, Movement Research Performance Journal, (34), pp. 1-16.)) This is true. And at first, I felt like I was naked. Later on down the line, when I became accustomed to it, I then felt like I was nude. It has since occurred to me that what bothered me during those difficult few weeks of trying to be brave was not people judging my naked body, but people judging the fact that I was naked at all in front of them.

This is where it became interesting. People’s reactions to my performance in the bathroom were, initially, what worried me. However, it ended up being people’s reactions that made this piece so interesting and even important to me. In creating their participatory performance encounters, performance artist pair, Lone Twin are always “interested in considering what good could come from these encounters” ((Lavery, Carl & David Williams (2011) ‘Practising Participation A conversation with Lone Twin’, Performance
Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, XVI(4), pp. 7-14)) and that really resonated with what I wanted from my performance. Rather than purely to shock people, I wanted them to feel reassured. I wanted them to come in, maybe expecting the worst based on what they saw, but then unexpectedly quite enjoy themselves and take something pleasant away from it. As Lone Twin said, “It’s good to dance with someone else, good to be friends with somebody else, good to walk with someone else” ((Lavery, Carl & David Williams (2011) ‘Practising Participation A conversation with Lone Twin’, Performance
Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, XVI(4), pp. 7-14)) and that is what what performance was about – sharing.

Performance ProcessPhoto taken 05/02/2013 by Jozey Wade

Even though I set up the bathroom to be as inviting as possible, with candles, bubbles, music and all sorts of bath lotions, some audience members that joined my company, naturally, enjoyed it more and felt more comfortable than others. For a couple of people specifically, the idea of being in a bathroom with a naked girl, being asked to “give me a hand” washing my back, seemed to be quite painful. Perhaps it was to do with past experience in their lives, or perhaps – like me some way through this process – they had yet to see how such an experience could be anything but bizzare and uncomfortable. Despite the fact that there were these couple of people who didn’t respond as I hoped them to, it surprisingly didn’t take away from the performance for me. Seeing how different people reacted was part of what made it interesting. Seeing the people who I perhaps expected to be uncomfortable chatting away to me and really getting involved, as much as the people I expected to be comfortable, really struggling with being in there at all. In addition, it’s worth noting that, even the people who didn’t “get” as much from the experience (and this was, as I said, only a couple) were in no way judgmental or rude – on the contrary they only commented on how they thought I was brave and how they could not do such a thing themselves. As my final audience member put so eloquently during his visit – “It makes you realise that not that many people are actually dicks!” and this could not be more true.

Performance ProcessPhoto taken 08/02/2013 by Jozey Wade

I would be lying entirely if I said every aspect of this performance process has been enjoyable for me. It has been difficult. At times I’ve felt engaged and eager and at times it’s felt almost impossible. I think that is what has ended up making it such an important experience for me. It has opened doors, not just within the performance world, but also with regards to my own mentality. No performance I have ever done before has come close to affecting me in the way being in that bathroom has, and I could not be more glad that I pushed myself, and was pushed by Conan and my fellow performers, through the doubts and difficulties. The experience really taught me a great deal about trust, sharing and human interaction – as I hope it did for my audience members.

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.