Following our initial visit to The Collection, we have developed some ideas for our performance. We’ve decided to focus our performance on the café as we were intrigued by its position in the museum and the observations we had made there when we first visited.
One of the ideas that we came up with was inspired by the architectural layout of the building and the café as it is separated from the rest of the museum. We thought that we could create something in the café that is not meant to be there such as an exhibition. Due to the fact that the café is in a museum it seems out of place and so to include the café as another exhibition would emphasise this fact. Another idea came from the different people we saw in the café.
“Analyses of everyday like similarly influenced much environmental theatre and site specific performance” (Allain and Harvie,2006, p 151).
We thought that the people themselves could be exhibits by placing placards with the information found by the artifacts and paintings at The Collection. Further thought needs to be given to what we ourselves will do as part of the performance. Hopefully in the next week we will put our ideas into motion and experiment with how we can be a part of our performance.
Some of the other ideas we collaborated were to use objects to create our own exhibition in the café for example cups, plates, cake stand. We liked how the alcove seating in the café were framed and from the outside it could be seen as a framed painting, the windows in the café also mirrored those of the Education Suite, which were on the second floor of the building. Thought went in to the duration of the piece and whether it would gradually progress throughout the day or be at a certain time. Another observation we made in the café was the music playing, we thought that perhaps we could create our own soundtrack similar to an audio tour of a museum but instead change the information to the café and the people sitting in the café.
Works Cited:
Allain, Paul and Jen, Harvie (2006) The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance, London: Routledge.