Rooms – Page 5 – ________-Safe House-_________

Less ketchup, more Howells.

Jozey Wade / April 15, 2013May 9, 2013 / Documentation, Home, Performance process, Research, Rooms

Having set my sights on the aspect of purging, involving both myself and the audience, I tested out my Andre Stitt inspired performance idea.

Picture taken 08/03/2013 by Angela Graham

Unfortunately, covering myself in a substance (which ended up being tomato ketchup – as can be seen above) was not as successful as I would have liked, and I decided that it did not fit well with the logistics of the entire performance in the house.

Since then, I have explored the work of other performance artists who explore the idea of purging and/ or audience involvement.

Adrian Howells work, while not directly described as purging, deals with confession – which is, in a way, a cleansing for the soul. As a matter of fact, as we see in the above video, one of his performances is actually called Foot Washing For The Sole. In this performance he washes and massages an audience member’s feet while partaking in a confessional exchange with them. In much the same way, in another of his performances, known as Salon Adrienne, he dresses in drag (which he explains – or confesses – makes him feel more comfortable in his own skin) within a hair salon and performs as the audience members hair dresser while conversing with them in a manner that one would not normally with a stranger but perhaps with a friend, confessing and encouraging them to confess to him things about themselves to him.

This idea of spending time with a stranger in a way that you would only usually do so with a close friend really rang true with a lot of exploration I had done and discussed within the bathroom. As Conan so eloquently put – What if you are just having a bath and you invite people in?

One thing that has remained in my head throughout all of my exploration and research has been that the bathroom is a private place. What we do in the bathroom, we generally don’t do in front of anyone. But even if there are people we do it in front of – it is close family or lovers. All along I have seen this privacy as an almost sacred thing and the idea of anyone invading it as somehow dangerous or perverted. However, inspired by Howells’ practises, I have come to look at it from another angle. Inviting a stranger into this private space is sharing something intimate with them; it evokes and highlights the importance and gratification of human interaction. Without trying to be corny, there is actually something quite beautiful about it. Undeniably, it would be frightening, for both audience member and performer, but that fear and overcoming it together adds to what it would achieve.

http://totaltheatrereview.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/l_any/reviews/adrian-howells-pleasure-being.jpg

Another aspect of Howell’s work which stands out as appropriate to my bathroom piece, is that it is one to one – as can be seen in the above picture of his performance, The Pleasure of Being: Washing, Feeding, Holding. This “shift in the traditional performer/spectator divide” ((Heddon D, Iball H, Zerihan R. ‘Come Closer: Confessions of Intimate Spectators in One to One Performance’, Contemporary Theatre Review. February 2012;22(1) pp. 120-133.)) before anything else, almost automatically makes the performance an interactive one. It turns “the audience’s role into one that receives (and) responds” ((Heddon D, Iball H, Zerihan R. ‘Come Closer: Confessions of Intimate Spectators in One to One Performance’, Contemporary Theatre Review. February 2012;22(1) pp. 120-133.)) much more directly, and “is actively solicited, engendered as a participant” ((Heddon D, Iball H, Zerihan R. ‘Come Closer: Confessions of Intimate Spectators in One to One Performance’, Contemporary Theatre Review. February 2012;22(1) pp. 120-133.)). As I said previously, audience involvement in my piece is something I want. And although previously I was perhaps looking at having two audience members at a time (which may have worked just fine with the Adrian Stitt inspired idea), having explored Howells’ work, I feel that being one to one with each audience member that sees my piece would be much more effective. The intimacy that is created in is performances, largely due to them being one to one, is the kind of intimacy I wish to create in my bathroom.

The performance shown in the above picture – The Pleasure of Being: Washing, Feeding, Holding – was actually done in a hotel bathroom. Interestingly, it is the first piece of performance art in a bathroom that I have managed to find at all, so I was quite excited to read about it. The bathroom was set up with “a bath full of bubbles and rose petals, candles in glass jars” ((Prior, D (2011)’ Adrian Howells: The Pleasure of Being: Washing, Feeding, Holding’ Total Theatre Review, 22 August, accessed 20 March 2013, http://totaltheatrereview.com/reviews/pleasure-being-washing-feeding-holding)) which is just how intend to decorate my bathroom. I want to create that inviting, warm and relaxing atmosphere. I want the audience member to enjoy being there, despite how awkward a situation it is in reality. In her review, Dorothy Max Prior compares the bathroom scene in Howells’ performance to somewhere you would spend “an assignation with a new lover” ((Prior, D (2011)’ Adrian Howells: The Pleasure of Being: Washing, Feeding, Holding’ Total Theatre Review, 22 August, accessed 20 March 2013, http://totaltheatrereview.com/reviews/pleasure-being-washing-feeding-holding)), which goes back to what I have been saying all along – if there is anyone you would allow to see you in the bath, it would be close family or a lover. This is exactly the scene I want to create… and then invite a stranger in.

There is a key difference however, between what Howells’ piece involved and what mine will. As the performer, Howells puts the audience member in the bath, pampers and bathes them. I, on the other hand, intend the flip this around, in that I will be the one in the bath; I will be the one in the vulnerable and private situation and I will ask the audience member to help wash me. I am choosing to do it this way partly because my performance is merely part of a larger collective performance and I must always bare this in mind, so to let the audience know they may have to bring swim wear specifically for my part of the performance would be quite difficult (and the likelihood of many audience members willingly getting naked is remote). I am, however, also choosing to do it this way because of the importance of the room in my performance by comparison to Howells’. The bathroom and what it means to us is something I need and want to get across (as our performance is about home) and I think, for the audience member to walk in on someone bathing as they usually would in the comfort of their own home, relates to and represents this more than treating them as though they are at a spa day.

Façade

Tiffany Abatilda Thompson / April 14, 2013May 12, 2013 / 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.

The ‘blinding’ performance

Andrew Tinley / April 11, 2013April 13, 2013 / 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.

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 4^th 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.

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, 4^th 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 / April 10, 2013May 8, 2013 / 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 / April 9, 2013May 13, 2013 / 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: 9^th 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.