Category: Uncategorized

Façade

Tiffany Abatilda Thompson / / 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 confessions of a hoarder

Lauren Elizabeth Walker / / Home, Performance process, Research, Uncategorized
A Hoarders front room

Hoarding is a form of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) it usually begins early in life, and can be seen in children. Children create extremely intense attachments to objects and have a tendency to personify things. Hoarding expands to become a modest problem in the 20’s and 30’s and becomes a severe problem in the 40’s and 50’s. Hoarders feel attached to their objects for several different reasons. These attachments take the form of attaching human- like qualities to lifeless possessions, feeling grief at the prospect of losing the objects, and deriving a sense of safety from being surrounded by objects. Other beliefs hoarders have are the necessity of saving things to keep memories and to appreciate the beauty of the objects. They also believe in not wasting objects or losing opportunities that are represented by them.  When researching hoarders I came across a survey comparing people with OCD who are hoarders and people who are non-hoarders.

 

hoarder graph lauren W
This grave shows the feelings and emotions of a hoarder and a non-hoarder.

“Living spaces sufficiently cluttered so as to precluds for which those spaces were designed” ((Nedelisky, A, & Steele, M 2009, ‘Attachment to people and to objects in obsessive-compulsive disorder: an exploratory comparison of hoarders and non-hoarders’, Attachment & Human Development, 11, 4, pp. 365-383, Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 7 April 2013.))

                This quote was taken from the survey/ article and I think it relates very closely to our performance, we are setting out to make our audience feel uncomfortable. Making it difficult for them to walk through a living room like you would in any other normal house. Giving them the feeling that they would actually experience in a home of a hoarder. They will walk into the room, and be in total shock at what they see, but try to not disturb and act as if nothing is it out of the ordinary. Something that most people would do when they are faced with something unexpected when they are guest in someone’s home, the experience we would like to give the audience is one they have never experienced or seen before. Our group do not want them to enter and us to perform and show them our room; we want them to take what they want from it whether that is disgust shock or fascination. The audience may understand the reasoning behind our performance, and why the room is full of pizza boxes and beer cans but they may not, but really it doesn’t matter we are there no one really knows why or what has occurred before they opened the door but that doesn’t matter. ((Etchells, T 2006, ‘Instructions for Forgetting’, TDR: The Drama Review, 50, 3, pp. 108-130, International Bibliography of Theatre & Dance with Full Text, EBSCOhost, viewed 7 April 2013)) ((Fugen, N, Steven, W, Jennifer, A, & Dean, M n.d., ‘Compulsive hoarders: How do they differ from individuals with obsessive compulsive disorder?’, Psychiatry Research, 200, pp. 35-40, ScienceDirect, EBSCOhost, viewed 7 April 2013.)) ((Fischer, S 2001, ‘A Room of Our Own: Rodinsky, Street Haunting and the Creative Mind’, Changing English: Studies In Reading & Culture, 8, 2, p. 119, Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 7 April 2013.))

 

Safe House.

Lauren Bethany Elouise Watson / / Uncategorized

 

  • A place where people may go to avoid prosecution of their activities by authorities.
  • A place where undercover operatives may conduct clandestine observations or meet other operatives surreptitiously.
  • A location where a trusted adult or family or charity organization provides a safe haven for victims of domestic abuse.
  • A home of a trusted person, family or organization where victims of war and/or persecution may take refuge, receive protection and/or live in secret.
  • Right of asylum. ((N/A (2013) Safe house, Online: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe_house (accessed 23 March 2013).))

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.

 

The Void.

Tiffany Abatilda Thompson / / Performance process, Uncategorized

The TV now plays a big part in our homes; it’s what centers our lives as well as social media. If we’re not catching the latest episode of ‘Embarrassing Bodies’ or watching the new Nicki Minaj music video then we’re not cool. TV has ruined our world, we all become hypnotized by the box and not engaging or socializing with family and/or friend’s we live with. This is making the living room feel like there’s no life as everyone is just in a trance, making it go back to what the living room originally was used for and being “The living dead room” (( Heathcote, E (2012) The Meaning of Home London:Frances Lincoln.)).

photo 734031_439763769427834_1507547987_n.jpg
Photo Taken:  05/03/2013  credit to: Libby Soper.

With the living room normally been left for best and for when visitors came, now we take the space for granted. These spaces used to have laughter music and life, now all we have is lifeless people staring into a void of nothingness.

With being in the living room we expanded our idea of us doing what we normally do in the living room and take it to the extreme so it points out to the audience just how much we sit stare and do nothing. What happens if we take the norm to an extreme?  In today’s session we played around with the idea myself, Lauren and Sam all took different positions in the living room facing the TV which had a paused image on the screen. Adding to this we all had a still position that we would keep for an hour to get the Spectator’s reaction, fellow peers came in and sat down and after they experienced this we approached them to see what they felt and they said they felt uneasy and that the living room had a different atmosphere.

To develop the idea of making the norm into the only thing we do with the world living around us with the pizza boxes and the booze bottles on the floor to show that the room has been lived in and that the room had life.