Tag: Lauren Walker

Bye Bye living room!

Lauren Elizabeth Walker / / Home, Performance process, Research, Rooms, Uncategorized, West Parade

Well that’s our performances finished, can’t believe it’s over. Things have changed and developed so much from our first tour of the house on west parade. All of our ideas have expanded so much. When we first chose the living room we  were concentrating on our feelings for that room, but as we progressed we realised that the living room is so much more then just a place to ‘relax’ and feel at ‘home’ because there is so many different homes. Our first initial thought were so different to our final performance but in some sense very similar we originally wanted to create an experience for an audience that would be something that is familiar to them, doing things that they would do on a daily basis in their living room, and also bringing back memories of their experiences. Exploring things like watching television ordering pizza and having a glass of wine. We then realised that was quite typical and showing someone life in a living room isn’t necessarily about doing obvious things, maybe it was more then that. Stripping back all the technology and conversation and sitting there in silence gave the audience a chance to reflect on their experiences, It became more about us as performers and the notion that our body images a sort of still picture, were more important then doing something very typical of a living room “I strongly believe that the most powerful tool today is performance  is the artist herself”. ((Conroy Colette (2010) Theatre & The body London:palgrave macmillan))

Sitting in silence and being completely still is harder then I first thought, but the more audience members we had it became easier, by sitting still in silence you begin to really feel the value of silence and find yourself in a relaxed state. “What kind of mental exercise should the performer have to do to prepare?” ((Conroy Colette (2010) Theatre & The body London:palgrave macmillan)) is one the questions Colette Conroy asks in the book “theatre and the body” I feel that this question relates perfectly to our performance because we did not have to prepare physically like in other performance we needed to prepare ourselves mentally. Our minds had to be cleared and we needed to concentrate.We almost became a work of art, a still image that the audience could interpret how ever they wanted to. In my opinion because we had the paused image on the screen it was like someone had pressed pause on our lives.

One thing that I feel went well was, was something we didn’t anticipate because our performance was at night was when it became dark the only light was the light from the television and it reflected on the rubbish and created shadows and an outline of the clutter. This added to the affect that, like the rubbish was art in a some sort of form.

“Audience’s reactions to our room were very different to others in the house, it was very interesting to see how every different audience member did something different. Some people seemed as if they were very comfortable and explored the room as if it was exciting and others found it very daunting and uncomfortable to be in. One audience member could not stand the anticapation and tried to get out because you could see that she phyiscally could not stand that she didn’t know what was going to happen next. The clutter and rubbish shocked the audience even more, and you could tell they were trying to work out why it was there. I feel we filled the room well and had enough stuff to give the feel of a hoarders front room, but we still could have had more!

rubbish
Photo Taken by Tiffany Thompson

  “A man walks across this empty space whilst someone is watching him and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged” (( Brook, Peter (1968) The Empty Space, London:pelican books)) . I feel that this quotes sums our performance ideas perfectly. Forgetting for a moment that our room was filled with clutter. The fact that we were sat amongst it as still images is our ‘perfomance’ we did not need to move because the images were enough to create tension and questions for the audience members. 

I don’t want anybody to see my face

Lauren Elizabeth Walker / / Home, Performance process, Uncategorized, West Parade

“The task of making text for performance” ((Tim Etchells (1999). Certain Fragments. New york: Routledge)) The process of writing performance is something our living room group have always been interested in. We have found ‘Tim Ethcells’ certain fragments fascinating and we have tried to incorporate this into our performance, without it being to obvious. We also struggled to find text or come up with one that related to our room. When reading through a past blog I came across the idea I had when watching ‘Life is sweet’ about how some people may feel like prisoners in there own home. I then expanded on this idea, and so did the rest of our group by coming up individually with a reason why we would be a prisoner in this house. We then decided to use the props we were using, for example pizza boxes news papers and receipts and tell our story without making it obvious to the audience, if they happened to pick up a box with a sentence on it that related to our story and then picked up a receipt with a another sentence or word it wouldn’t matter they didn’t understand it will get the audience asking questions and participating the performance asking questions like Why are we there? Why were we still? What had happened before they entered? , our intention was for the writing to be a code for the audience. The stories we came up with could be anything fiction or non fiction, we tried to make them fictional as possible even if they didn’t make sense. Reading end land stories gave me loads of ideas. (( Etchells Tim (1999) Endland stories London:Pulp Faction))

agoraphobia-2

The story I came up with goes…

My father abuses me mentally, but the more he abuses me mentally the affects show physically. When he died my face stayed like this forever and now I don’t want to leave to leave my house this causes me to have the disease agoraphobia.

Some of the sentences scattered around the room from my individual story was..

 

  • HE makes my face look worse
  • People stare why should I suffer when they are ignorant?
  • Replace fear with selfishness and indifference
  • I don’t want people to see this ugly stressful face

“Seems I’m talking my whole life, it’s time I listen now”

Lauren Elizabeth Walker / / Home, Music / Sound, Performance process, Research

“Like his voice can’t deal with things it has to describe, That’s the thing you have to do with a voice after all – make it speak of the things you cannot deal with- makes it speak of the illegal ” ((Tim Etchells (1999). Certain Fragments. New york: Routledge. 98-176))

What if you take away all the voices? What if a performance has no words, no specific message and is completely open to the audience’s interpretation, but surely silence has meaning?

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bm_tTkHooZI 

In this you tube video, the university student talks about the value of silence and quotes her professor he describes how “Every individual structures their attitudes, beliefs, lifestyle, and behaviours around a theme. What is the life philosophy by which you live, and how has it shaped you as a person?” She goes on to say that her theme is the value of silence and of a quiet mind, she explains that “It’s something that I think is particularly relevant to modern youth, because the observation of silence is not something that our generation engages in enough” What happens when we explore the diversity and difficulty of silence in different situations? People like to focus on words and sounds, because they are comfortable words make a house feel homely. People are scared of silence, they are obsessed with noise they find it difficult to be alone to just shut the curtains; lock there doors. People are afraid because it is unfamiliar, when you isolate yourself there is no where to run.

She also says “I don’t think that practicing silence is necessary for observing silence. It has to do more with having a quiet mind than physically immersing oneself in silence” In our performance as our piece is a durational performance and we are going to have to have a quiet mind and physically immerse our self into our performance in silence.

Tim etchells talks about the meaning of silence, he made a list of silence of different situations

“ These are some examples of the list of silences

The kind of silence you sometimes get in phone calls to a person that you love.

The kind of silence people only dream of.

The kind of silence that follows a car crash.

The kind of silence between waves at the ocean”

Some examples that really interested me and relate to our room are…

“The kind of silence after a big argument

The kind of silence that only happens at night

The kind of silence is only for waiting in” ((Tim Etchells (1999). Certain Fragments. New york: Routledge. 98-176))

What if you took the kind of silence that is only for waiting in, and put it in a homely environment? Would that make the audience feel uncomfortable would they feel like there waiting for something? Our audience may feel that they are waiting for something to happen in our performance but it never does.

What if you left a room waiting?

“The atmosphere still retained the oppressiveness of a religious space; it seemed natural to speak in whispers. I felt my way along the corridor and opened the door at the end. The peeling paintwork of the synagogue was lit by warm yellow candlelight” ((Rachel Linchtenstein and Iain Sinclair (1999) Rodinsky’s Room: an excerpt http://www.artangel.org.uk//projects/1999/rodinsky_s_whitechapel/excerpt/excerpt (acessed: 10 April 2013)))

Rondinskys Room is story of what became of the reclusive Jewish scholar David Rondinsky, whose room at 19 Princlet street London was discovered undisturbed and had been left for 20 years after. As I was reading and researching into the story I found myself asking the question what silence would you call the silence of a room left alone to gather dust for 20 years be? Going on from what I was saying earlier about “the silence of waiting” I feel that this is the silence that applies to his room. When we go on holiday our house is waiting for us to come back, to make it home again. I feel that when I come home after being on holiday my house seems different smells different, sometimes even looks different we have to adjust ourselves to that space and learn to live in it again.  Rondinskys room was waiting for him to come back to come home but he never did, and was found by somebody else someone that it wasn’t familiar with. I feel that this added to the atomosphere in the room, and if we can create this kind of feeling for the audience in the living room it will be a very frightning and awkward situation for them to be in.

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.))

 

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.