________-Safe House-__________ – Page 21 – Where living becomes a performance.

There’s no place like home…is there?

Elizabeth Soper / January 24, 2013May 13, 2013 / West Parade

“A place owes its character to the experiences it affords to those who spend time there – to the sights, sounds and indeed smells that constitute its specific ambience.” ((Ingold quoted in Pearson, Mike (2010) Site-Specific Performance, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, p.15))

For some people, a home is a place of safety and security. It is a place full of memories of their families and their childhood. For others it is somewhere to relax and unwind after a long day, shutting their troubles behind the front door. However there is something very different between a ‘home’ and a ‘house’. I think after seeing the house we will be working in for the first time, that is something everyone will agree with! There’s something about walking into a house with old fashioned peeling wallpaper, dirty and dusty skirting boards and the smell of muskiness hitting you in each room that makes you not feel at home – which already makes this a very intriguing place to be working in! “Not all spaces built by man have this character of homeliness, but they should not all have them; for not all are intended for the purpose of ‘dwelling’ in the strict sense, of feeling sheltered within them during ones stay.” ((Bollnow, O.F. (2011) Human Space, London: Hyphen Press, p.142))

Photo taken: 02/02/13 – ‘The Kitchen’

For me, the room I felt safest and most comfortable was the kitchen. This room I felt played no tricks, it was there for that purpose; to be a kitchen. Rooms such as the CCTV room was the room for spying, the cot room felt strangely eerie and held mystery (although interestingly it may not have felt this way if the cot had not been placed there), as does the main bedroom with it’s lack of furniture, yet perfectly made bed and out of place lamp. Whereas the kitchen felt like it was away from the weirdness, tucked at the back of the house, in which I could escape.

This whole idea of purpose gave me many ideas for what we could do with this space. Perhaps treating each room as if it was a different one, ignoring what it might be and its real purpose. For example the kitchen could become a bedroom using its cupboards as a wardrobe. I thought perhaps displaying pre-recorded CCTV footage on the television in the living room for the audience to watch would be interesting. This will already make the audience feel unnerved which is how I felt in most rooms of the house. “and the desire to provoke, shock, and unsettle spectators is central to the avant-garde.” ((Freshwater, Helen (2009) theatre & audience, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp.45-46))

So…I Am Sitting In A Cupboard.

Lauren Bethany Elouise Watson / January 23, 2013May 13, 2013 / Home, Rooms

Cupboards and “doors open onto an ever more private realm of intimate things” ((Heathcote, Edwin (2012) The Meaning Of Home, London: Frances Lincoln, p. 77)), and because of this unique quality they give you a chance to find a place to hide away, somewhere different faraway….and safe. On another plane, not quite belonging to a floor or area. Something not used just for storage of things, but also of memories, people and tears. This is what I found in our new house.

The cupboard in the bedroom instantly reminded me of my last home. An old bedroom. A walk in cupboard which housed the boiler…my favourite teddies. A place to play hide and seek, or a place to go and cry. Until five years ago it had always been my room.

I have one stand out memory of this hiding place. It’s not exactly pleasant, so I think that’s why the feel of the house triggered them.
I had been told off at school for talking during a Math lesson, and I remember getting home, getting into that space, and crying. In the space, I started to do maths wrong as a sort of punishment on purpose. It was a place where I could judge myself without being judged by my mum, or being a burden. I have never really cried in front of my mum, even to this day, because I thought (and indeed still think) that I had to be strong for her – to be a ‘big girl’ and help look after my brother because we were a single parent family.

Now the boiler is gone, and the room is no longer mine to claim…but it still feels like home to me.

To close the cupboard door and sit in silence was perfect, and something I still crave. Not necessarily a cupboard anymore, but just the darkness and a closed door. I got brought up to be independent, fiercely so. I didn’t have much of a choice – we moved around a bit, I helped raised my eldest younger brother, and I became my mum’s confidant. I had to be strong for her so never cried. I had to grow up quick.

So, sitting here in my cupboard in our house on West Parade, not quite in the darkness with the door open, the cupboard floods me with memories. Memories of crying where no-one else could see. A place of putting myself down. It’s the dark cupboard that let me cry and I’ll always be grateful.
A little place where I could go to be a child.

A place where, looking back, I developed my gratitude and strive for learning.

A place which shaped me.

Taken by Jozey Wade, 3rd February 2013.

In this anti-space, I can see something quiet and personal being developed, something hidden that the audience has to find; a human installation. With personal experiences, transforming such a small space could be something very beautiful and touching, allowing “[our] past to surge into the present” ((McAuley quoted in Pearson, Mike (2010) Site-Specific Performance, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 10)). The bedroom (and therefore , by extension, our cupboard) is “the most intimate, the most private and the most precious” ((Heathcote, Edwin (2012) The Meaning Of Home, London: Frances Lincoln., p. 71)) room in the house, so what happens if we both heightened and paradoxed these notions? If we created the bedroom to be safe and welcoming, almost of that of a childs, and the cupboard to expose the adult side of the bedroom. To have two highly polarized notions in such close proximity would create a powerful and contrasting performance, giving both audience members a completely different, and unique, experience.

When dealing with the cupboard, the bedroom and what lies there cannot be ignored. To fuse the two performance areas would make a stronger and more fulfilling performance. For example, when dealing with children; their imaginations, emotions, expectations and understanding of reality, you are allowed to bend the rules and break the conventions and restraints of social normality, so what happens if we took this notion and transfered it to the bedroom?

In the bedroom we get read fairy tales. We can all name at least one fairy tale or bedtime story I’m sure. However, with retrospect and looking at them through ‘adult’ eyes, we find hidden meanings, basic moral lessons, and sometimes things we don’t deem all that appropriate now we have experienced and lived within the adult world. A perfect example of this is the notion of the ‘Animal Groom’. Bettelheim puts forward the notion that “for love [to occur], a radical change in previously held attitudes about sex is absolutely unnecessary” and that “a common feature to [the fairy tales] is the sexual partner first experienced as an animal” ((Bettelheim, Bruno (1978[1991]) The Uses of Enchantment, London: Penguin Books, p. 282.)) becomes transformed into a, usually, handsome being. However, when viewed from an adult’s perspective it becomes disturbing: a woman committing bestiality and embedding the notion of being submissive and compliant within relationships from an early age.

It has become increasingly apparent that mixing adult themes into children’s literature appears to be as old as fairy tales and folklore itself. What happens if we make the literature, or the space, overtly adult? Would it still fall within the classifications of a fairy tale if lessons were learned the frame work complied. Could we argue that we are just modernising the literature? If the undertones of lost virginity and the exploration of the notion that “there are no longer any sexual secrets which must remain unknown” ((Bettelheim 1978, p. 308)), Beauty and the Beast would no longer be read as an innocent children’s story. If we were to transfer the adult side of the bedroom into the cupboard, but still make it apparent and blatantly obvious, would our bedroom still be considered safe? To create a narrative, played in the bedroom, but not in the bed, with adult intentions would be the epitome of this.

The Room of Dreaming

Lauren Simpson / January 23, 2013May 8, 2013 / Documentation, Home, Performance process, Research, Rooms

My first impressions of the house were that it already had its own atmosphere. My favourite room, though, was the main bedroom for many reasons. It seemed like the most artificial of all the rooms. The décor was as drab as all the others, but the way it was furnished made it look false. The bedding was neatly made, and the bedside table and lamp were in pristine condition. I instantly thought that this room was hiding something. The distinct lack of furniture was unnerving. The room simply consisted of a bed in the centre, a bedside table with a lamp, and a built in cupboard on the wall.

The bedroom is considered a very familiar and secretive space. Cupboards are also renowned for this, “their doors open onto an ever more private realm of intimate things” ((Heathcote, E (2012) The Meaning of Home, London: Frances Lincoln, p 77)). As a visitor in someone’s home you rarely open a cupboard unless instructed to. In my mind, this makes the cupboard in the bedroom twice as private as anywhere else.

There are three main concepts or feelings associated with a cupboard. The obvious one is for storage. Generally, clutter and mess can be hidden neatly away in a cupboard as long as nobody finds it. Secondly, as highlighted so cleverly by Pixar, children often believe that monsters hide in their wardrobes or cupboards. This immediately sparks the emotion of a fear of the unknown. Finally, thanks to C.S Lewis, they can be seen as a place for escapism. All three of these uses can be either portrayed through performance or they can be turned upside down and contradicted.

To portray storage you could simply clutter the wardrobe with either things you wouldn’t associate with a house or very familiar objects.

“Clothes, the contents of the wardrobe are, of course, intimate items” ((Heathcote, E (2012) The Meaning of Home, London: Frances Lincoln, p 78.))

What if we filled it with even more intimate items to make the audience feel uncomfortable or make them feel like they have breached their rights as a visitor?

The escapism aspect could be shown through dreaming. Once the audience member was in the bed the cupboard could be opened. Inside could be filled with dream like objects, fairy lights, tinsel etc. It could also be effective to have a projector inside that projects footage of a dream onto the wall opposite. This would create a huge contrast between the bedroom and the cupboard and highlight the fact that a cupboard is a hiding place for a person, objects or even for thoughts.

The work of Lital Dotan also gave me a lot of inspiration for performance ideas. She uses the technique of installation in her own home. She opens her own bedroom to the public. She lifts her mattress against the wall every day. “The underside reveals a “personal graffiti wall,” covered in loose colorful yarn stitched to form Dotan’s various notes to self:”(Ortiz 2013)

Dotan’s bed / art project (Photo by Emily Wilson) (accessed: 12/02/13) ((Ortiz, Jen (2013) ‘Life as a Glass House’ Narratively, 25 January. http://blackboard.lincoln.ac.uk/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab_tab_group_id=_2_1&url=%2Fwebapps%2Fblackboard%2Fexecute%2Flauncher%3Ftype%3DCourse%26id%3D_67088_1%26url%3D))

This flips the notion of the bedroom being the most private room in the house on its head. Turning it into a form of gallery makes it the most public space. This is an intriguing notion to look at possibly using for a couple of the performance dates.

First Impressions.

Tiffany Abatilda Thompson / January 22, 2013May 12, 2013 / Home, Uncategorized

Being in a house today has really opened my eyes to the wonders of theatre and art. Performing in a house has so much potential, with its intimacy and history of the property. There’s so many unique rooms with individual characteristics that would add to the performance. Being in a house limits our audience as we can only have twenty people in the house at one time, this makes the performance itself so intimate that it changes the dynamic of the performance.

Comparing to the norm of the theatre where you have an acting space and seating area there’s quite a distance between spectator and actor. However, being in a house changes this as there’s no specific place where audience are seated which changes the distance between the performers and the spectators this gives a different atmosphere to the performance itself.

After the session we had today looking around the house we can already see the potential of a brilliant performance. The house has CCTV in every room apart from the obvious bathroom areas, I like the idea of using CCTV as part as the performance as it give us more variety and could possibly expand our audience. We can use pre-recorded videos and stream them in the house or elsewhere.

Part of the session today was to find a room that we like and could potentially make a performance in; I chose the living room as you could do so much with it and had a personal connection with me. In the living room everything seems to happen, family gatherings, birthdays, Christmas, parties and so much more. A personal memory triggered me when I entered this room. I was only a child and thought I would surprise my mum after she went out to the pub with her boyfriend. So I waited up and when I heard them coming through the door I hid in the living room. I was going to jump out and surprise her. This was when I saw her boyfriend at the time physically abusing her being in that room it always reminded me of that night.

Some might think this inappropriate, but the reason why I put this on the blog was because not all nice things happen in such a happy area, and behind all those smiles and laughter something bad might just be hiding, covered by the ‘act’ we are forced to put on when inviting people into our home.

I had many ideas of performances that could occur in this room, one was man and wife sat in the living room sat watching a loop of their memories of Christmas, birthday’s, family gathering, parties etc. Whilst they are sat there with just blank expressions let the audience come in sit with them or stand watching them or the T.V.

Reflections and first impressions

Jozey Wade / January 22, 2013May 12, 2013 / CCTV, Documentation, Home, Research, Rooms

Seeing and being in the house for the first time has filled me with all sorts of thoughts, ideas and excitement about the potential of our work here.

Firstly, with all the rooms, there is such opportunity to have so much going on for an audience or “visitors” to see and engage with. Personally, rather than looking at the house as a whole, I have been seeing individual performance spaces – what happens in a lounge is so different from what happens in a bathroom and so, performances in these spaces could and probably would be vastly different.

I’m generalising, but I just like the idea of something different going on in every room, perhaps even using the CCTV in every room but in different ways. For example, I love the thought of exploring the idea of voyeurism so that could be explored in one room, using the CCTV in that creepy/ stalker way – obviously, as someone suggested, using the audience in some way, with this idea of being watched. Also, I like the idea of contrasting images on the TV, showing what really happens in a particular room behind closed doors, with the audience being treated as visitors; I think the lounge would be an ideal place for this. I also like the idea that in another room, we could explore the very different experiences/ ideas people have in relation to home or that particular kind of room, and perhaps have something live happening, along with a variety of vastly different examples of peoples experiences in the same room, shown in loop on the TV.

Photo taken 01/02/2013 by Jozey Wade

One thing I wanted to mention about the reading, that we addressed in a way in class, is the idea, as Pearson suggests: “a places owes it’s character not only to the experiences it affords as sights, sounds etc. but also to what is done there…” ((Pearson, Mike (2010) Site-Specific Performance, Palgrave Macmillan)). I think this idea of a place having a character or an atmosphere related to what has happened there, on top of the actual physical look/ smell of the place, definitely directly relates to the house we are using.

As we discussed in the session today, the fact that we know the house is used for what it is used for, automatically creates certain images and feelings in our head when looking at or visiting certain rooms. For example, although a bathroom is usually a place I feel most safe or relaxed – due to door locks, being alone and undisturbed, nice hot baths etc – when I was in the bathroom at this particular house, horrible and extreme as it sounds, images of awful things like suicide, accidents with electrics popped into my head. Obviously, this is due to the atmosphere I feel there because of knowing the negative connotations related to what the house is used for. The marks on the wall and peeling paint (as can been in the picture below) add the that feeling of unease and remind me of the true usage of the house.

Photo taken 01/02/2013 by Jozey Wade

However, an audience may not know about the usage and history of the house, so will the house have the same atmosphere to them? Probably not. So what will an audience, with no knowledge of the house at all, feel when they enter and explore it? What will the atmosphere be like to them? It might be important to keep this in mind.