After much discussion and plenty of thinking, our group has decided to move out of the cafe and into the courtyard space. We have done this whilst thinking of our audience and the feedback we received. We felt that we could leave the cafe so we were not limiting ourselves to audience restrictions and partly because we did not want to inconvenience anyone! But also the space is larger and it enables us to use the framed alcove seating which is something we have liked from the beginning.
From the feedback we realised that we had lost the idea of making the cafe a exhibition; our original idea. After much more experimentation and some more feedback, the key was to keep it simple. Along with this relocation, we decided that the painting ‘Bound by Love’ was no longer relevant to our piece as it did not fit in with the concept of making the cafe an exhibition.
“Exhibition involves imposition of order on objects, brought into a particular space and a specific set of relations with one another” (Rugg and Sedgwick, 2007, p 29).
We had many ideas of the different ‘exhibits’ we could have outside including the conversations/quotes written down the stairs and a collage of photos of the cafe on the wall, however after thought and experiments these did not work. This left us with our two static exhibits of a cake stand and a tea set.
We maintained our part in the performance but altered Fran’s part. The first idea was to have Fran on a platform re-enacting a person in the cafe siting at a table drinking tea and eating something however with our mimic in the Education windows was still in place we decided that it was not needed. It then came that Fran would take on the character of a worker in the cafe, as this was another type of person we had observed whilst doing our earlier experiments, and be the third part to our exhibits of people including myself and Gabriel.
A new idea that came to light was the need for explanation of our exhibition. How are we to do this? We are going to take the idea of the ‘Specials’ board in the cafe and give a brief explanation for each part of our performance. This will hopefully help others to understand the concept behind our performance and encourage our audience to see new perspectives.
Works Cited:
Rugg, Judith and Michele Sedgwick(2007) Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance, Bristol: Intellect Books.