My room in a nut shell

Angela Michelle Graham / / Rooms

Within a child’s room safety is a key aspect, from the basic necessity of child proofing to protecting them from judgement, this can be seen by the common saying “a face only a mother can love”. Protection can come by trying to shield a child from the world or simply by helping them prepare such as for girls allowing them to play (practice) with make-up so as they understand the world they are going to grow up in. We also prepare them using the tools at are fingertips from books to films and TV allowing that to assist in teaching children what the world is like.

Childhood is all about “ways of moving into something different” ((Certeau, M. D. (1988). The practice of everyday life. Berkeley, University of California Press.)) from child to adult, boy to man, girl to woman and as I discussed in my previous blog this is manipulated by those around us from family to the media.  With the books we read our children at night telling them how prince charming will save the day, “Awareness of the fairy tale as a primary site for asserting and subverting ideologies of gender is evident throughout the genre’s history” ((Haase, D. (2004). Fairy tales and feminism: new approaches. Detroit, Wayne State University Press.)) with everyone from little red riding hood needing the wood cutter to save her from the wolf to sleeping beauty having to wait asleep for a man to simply kiss her and save her kingdom. This is also evident in many children’s films most modelled off these stories, with the women being unable to accomplish anything on their own needing a man to help them.

Nicole Brossard a poet, novelist, essayist and feminist states that “feminism would help us reclaim our stolen humanity” ((Brossard, N., & Forsyth, L. (2005). Nicole Brossard: essays on her works. Toronto, Guernica.)) You may believe this simply relates to actions from centuries ago when men sold women like cattle, but in fact relates to a modern notion that every woman needs a man that is perpetuated by films, in which even the strongest most independent women fail until they have a man by their side. But I am getting off topic, amongst Nicole Brossard’s works was a poem originally in French but translated into English “Typhon Dru” ((Brossard, N., & Bergvall, C. (1997). Typhon dru. London, Reality Street Editions.)) which are essentially very feminine poems, filled with beautiful descriptions “glides joy ribbon” ((Brossard, N., & Bergvall, C. (1997). Typhon dru. London, Reality Street Editions.)) I will be removing any mention of “Typhon Dru” ((Brossard, N., & Bergvall, C. (1997). Typhon dru. London, Reality Street Editions.)) as it makes it less accessible to an audience by giving it specific point of reference. The stanzas are also quite chaotic not quite following an obvious logical narrative as life itself often doesn’t.

I will use this aspect of the poem not necessarily in the order it was written but as I feel it befits the wool I am following at that moment. This will make the poem personal to me and those that choose to view my performance, it will give each audience member a different experience of my room. As while I am wholly concentrating on what I am doing they will be interpreting it in a way that is unique to them. This makes me curious as to whether there is way to have each audience member’s reaction to rooms as an individual kept and stored? Or if they will simply feel what we want them to? Is there a way to discover if they have understood what we were trying to create?

These are the ancestors

Lizzy Hayes / / CCTV, Documentation, Home, Music / Sound, Performance process, Research, Rooms

While the footage on its own had a great aesthetic effect  we decided that a relevant reading played over the top of each video clip would add to it. Each of us took on three rooms for which to find or write a text that we felt connected to the image, or added to or complimented the narrative of the clip. Considering the title of the whole performance was called ‘Safe House’ I looked in U.A. Fanthorpes “Safe As Houses”  (( U.A. Fanthorpe (1995) Safe As Houses: Poems by U.A. Fanthorpe. Cornwall: Peterloo Poets – a book of short poems )) . I found that the first stanza of the poem Haunting connected with mood and movement of the CCTV footage of the landing, discussing shadows and ancestors who just passed through. This coupled with the second stanza of the poem Last House  created a piece that spoke of shadows in three different senses-the darkness that requires light to be present, the ghost or image of a dead person, and the Shakespearean term for an actor.

“These are the ancestors. The shadow people,
who now and then lean softly from the dark
and stroke on chin or thumb the new generation.
This is their last performance. The delegate yaws doubtfully, as audiences do,
wanting the star to fall… but not until the last reel, at sunset, to the right music.” (( An adaptation of two poems by U.A. Fanthorpe (1995) Safe As Houses: Poems by U.A. Fanthorpe. Cornwall: Peterloo Poets ))

Another of my readings was a piece by David Rattray. His piece spoke of the fragility and ambiguity of existence in a way that complimented the brief existence of each of the life forms in every image.

“Life is a fragile hybrid pulsing, instant by instant, between being and nothingness. Even if every person on earth were to vanish suddenly from time and space, the mere fact of the absence would suffice to make humanity remain identical to what it already was. Absent.” (( Rattray, David (1992) How I Became One of The Invisible. USA: Semiotext p. 204 ))

For my final reading I took the lines of Lady Macbeth in Shakespeare’s Macbeth and used them for the kitchen footage. In this stanza the Lady Macbeth discusses the place of women in the house and how strong the female kind are and this felt attuned to the place of the women in the modern day kitchen.

Installation piece-Kitchen. By Lizzy Hayes, Lauren Hughes, Faye Mcdool

(To view all the installation video clips with voice recordings please visit Lauren Hughes YouTube account on http://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-d_h3abFFc4K36mLaNFaDw?feature=watch )

This was not the only feminist reading we acquired. For two of the other clips we used lines from H. G Wells’ book The Invisible Man but decided to alter the narrative to make them the voice of a woman. Not only was the text relevant to the clips in the text but also to us as CCTV operatives. We were the people who could see everything whilst remaining unseen.

Each video and sound clip was played off of a different screen, on a loop, in synchronisation and in a darkened room. For me the effect was haunting. To sit in the dark having nine different voices speak or whisper nine different pieces of text from varying points in the room felt like I was sat in the dark the centre of the  mind of a very thoughtful but confused person. Once again, I felt like I had power beyond my status: not only was I hearing the somewhat disjointed thoughts of various writers, poets and even fellow actors, but I still had the power to see the movements of every other person in the house. My way of overcoming the strange feeling? Play with the power.

 

 

The Bed as a performance space

Jake Robinson / / Research

“It all begins on the bed. Perhaps our tenderest and perhaps our most ecstatic moments occur there and, if we’re lucky, perhaps it all ends there too” ((Heathcoat, E (2012) The meaning of home, London: Frances Lincoln p.71)) as this extract explains the bed is a huge part of our lives as human beings. The bed, in its simplest form is the place in which we go to sleep. On average, we as homo-sapien’s , sleep for around a third of our lifetime. This alone proves the importance of the bed on our lives. Due to the large amount of time which we spend in bed it could be surmised that it would be a place where we would feel completely comfortable. However it still comes as a shock to people when they learn that we will be using a bed as our main performance space in Safehouse.

There are few examples of the bed being used as a performance space. Tracey Emin created an instillation piece entitled My bed in 1998, this piece reflected her bed without a live aspect to the performance. However this does not mean that we are unable to take inspiration from this piece. In an interview from 2012 when the piece was being exhibited at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, which you can see below:

Emin discusses the feelings she has returning to this work fourteen years after it was originally installed. Explaining the changes which have occurred in that time in her life and how that getting back into that bed to make it look correct for exhibition immediately brings back memories of that time. Pearson, in his book Site – Specific Performance takes this idea further, explaining that it not only the creator of the work but also the audience who are “informed by past experiences of how similar and how dissimilar this is to places you have known” ((Pearson, Mike (2010) Site – Specific Performance, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan p.29)) especially when watching a site – specific performances.

[peekaboo_link start=”Jake1″] WARNING – READING MORE OF THIS POST WILL REVEAL PERFORMANCE DETAILS! [/peekaboo_link][peekaboo_content name=”Spoilers” start=”hidden”] [peekaboo_link start=”visible”] Warning! Spoilers! [/peekaboo_link][peekaboo_content name=”Spoilers” start=”hidden”]

With this in mind, the performance we have created in the bed has been designed to inspire the audience to recall events from their own lives. Putting our audience to bed and reading them a story is a very childlike experience through which, we hope, our audience will respond and remember what it was like to actually be put to bed as a child. Later, putting a sleeping  mask on our audience and joining them in bed should inspire more adult memories to surface in their minds. Both of these experiences should allow the audience to recall happy memories of the bedroom. This is a completely different experience to that which the Voyeur will be having at the exact same time.

Although they will be happening simultaneously the two performances in the bedroom are incredibly different. In this sense we have created the bed as a performance of its own, a room of its own perhaps. This idea of the bed being a room of its own is discussed by Heathcoat, speaking about the history of the bedroom, and its uses to Monarch’s of the middle ages, he says that “the only privacy to be had was by turning the bed itself into a room” ((Heathcoat, E (2012) The meaning of home, London: Frances Lincoln p.72)).The audience member, with the sleeping mask on and in bed, has privacy and is in some way in a room of their own, gaining an experience which is solely theirs.

The performance which takes place is the bed will, we hope, bring to the forefront of our audiences minds memories of the bed and bedroom which they have experienced as children and adults. It is an extremely personal moment to get into bed with another person and something which is not a usual occurrence for the majority of people. I think this is why most people will feel somewhat apprehensive when they first encounter our performance. However, audience members seem to settle into the performance quickly and especially in the bed become comfortable through the childlike manner in which they are first treated. [/peekaboo_content]

 

Room of Screens

Faye Rose Mcdool / / CCTV, Performance process, Rooms, Technical

We have decided to allocate the CCTV room as the room of screens. In here, we will place all the Night filming footage with the recorded narratives played screens scattered around on the desk, book case and tables with the large TV screen showing the live CCTV  split 9 screen . Each screen will be allocated a different room from the filming with head phones attached to some devices and speakers to others. When the audience enter the room, it shall be blacked out with no natural light leaking in and only the light pollution from the computer, laptop and IPad screens.

For the narratives for the night filming footage, we have decided to base it on feminism and edit the original text which were written in the researched books. I have chosen to write the text for the Bedroom, Cot Room angle 2 and the Waiting Room. However, for the waiting room, as the images is so strong, I have decided to leave it silent without any text but with a strong static sound. The narratives for the other two rooms read:

Bedroom

Lying like this, I felt as if I had become part of the fabric around me, absorbed into the earth like a dead woman I had no individual existence. At that moment, I suddenly felt as if I had connected heaven and earth like a bridge. By trial and error I had found the position that enabled me to exist fully in that particular space. ((original text from: Oida, Yoshi. Marshall, Lorna 1997, The Invisible Actor. Cox & Wyman, Reading Berkshire))

Cot Room 2nd angle/Half and Half Face

Being invisible and without substance, a disembodied voice, as it were, what else could I do? What else but try to tell you what was really happening when your eye was looking through me? And it is this which frightens me as the interior. Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you. ((original text from: Rattray, David 1993 How I Became Invisible , Semiotext,U.S.: Central Bks))

The ordering of the clips depends on the audience and which video/screen they are attracted to first. The sounds on the video will be played into headphones and speakers on which the narrative printed out and placed near the screen so they can read the text also. The audience members will not be able to hear any noise pollution from outside and from the rest of the house.

Testing Testing..

Tiffany Abatilda Thompson / / Performance process

In today’s session we had 3 first years coming in at allocated slots to come view the performance. As our performance is in 3 weeks we felt this session was crucial as we could trial our ideas and hopefully get feedback afterwards.

 

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Performance Set Up West Parade
 

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Performance Set up 16/04/2013

The first 2 people arrived as a pair and came into our space, I and Sam beforehand prepared the space with the materials we had and got into position. With the pair of us being still my only concern was keeping still and making our performance message and intentions clear to the audience.

When the two first years arrived they got told to sit either side of me on the sofa. The pair had mixed reviews on what they had to do after they had sit down, One of them just sat there for a minute taking everything in and the other was constantly questioning what they had to do. As well as this, the pair tried interacting with us both, not knowing we wasn’t going to respond. As I was in the middle of them both I realised how unfocused I was, I kept corpsing which I realise now is something I need to work on. The first years wanted to get up and look around which I found interesting then it suddenly dawned on me that only one of the pair would be with us on the actual performance and then made me wonder what one of them would be like just on their own. Would they still try to interact? Or would they just sit there. After ten minutes was up the white rabbit came in and took the audience members away into her room.

Half an hour later a new spectator arrived to come see the house. When he entered the living room I felt I different atmosphere and when I realised he was on his own I knew this was going to be a completely different performance than the pair that we just had in. This spectator didn’t interact, didn’t talk he just sat there watching the T.V. This was a lot easier as I could just get completely focused on what I was performing.

At the end of the session I met up with the three spectators and asked for feedback and what they got from the performance in the living room, I had an interesting response. The first two said that it was weird and it took them a while to figure out what actually was the performance and said when they realised that the message of our performance was clear. The spectator that came on his own got the message straight away and thought that the performance was good and it was clear.

What I got from them watching the performance is that we need more leaflets, newspaper, junk mail and more lists for the audience to look at. We need to fill the space and make it look more extreme to make the performance become clearer on what we are trying to show.