Francesca Maria Izzo – Page 2 – The Collection Of…

This week we formed performance groups and decided where we wanted to perform in the Collection Gallery. As a few of us had chosen to study and research observations in the cafe, we decided this would be a good place to influence our performance. We conferred our experiences of the cafe and exchanged what we had observed which stood out for us individually. This then lead to us mind mapping possible performance options. A few of our initial ideas include making and putting on an exhibition in the cafe as this is the only area in the two buildings which doesn’t resemble an exhibition and therefore would be interesting to subvert the usual connotations attached to a cafe. One of the ways we thought we could do this would be by putting texts next to the individual artefacts which is done throughout the Collection and Usher Gallery. A couple of members of our group had also noticed a painting in the Usher Gallery, ‘Bound By Love’ which they felt stood out to them, as the painting didn’t connect with the other paintings in the same gallery. Therefore, we decided we would try and incorporate and merge the painting into our performance with the cafe.

From our collective recorded observations we noticed people don’t seem to be observant of other people and appear in their own world. Therefore we thought our exhibition could be about observation- how people look at things but aren’t really seeing or how people shut themselves off from everyone else; both in the cafe and in society. After this I read the introduction of Theatre and Museums where Kirschenblatt- Gimblett says, ‘todays museum is a theater, a memory palace, a stage for the enactment of other times and places’ (Bennett, 2013, p.4).Therefore making me think our piece could represent the observations we have noticed and recorded in the cafe by acting our snippets from what we have seen and heard, therefore representing and re-enacting real life events which at the same time displays our and other people’s memories of the cafe.

This then caused us to think of a research question to help us develop our ideas and create a focus for our piece, ‘How can you integrate the exhibitions and cafe into the performance area? What effect does this have and what atmosphere does it create?’ This then gave us further questions which lead to some answers on how we were going to develop our piece. We took inspiration from the painting and realised the architecture of the buildings (the cafe and the education room) were similar to the faces in the painting. The distance was similar and made us think of the distance between each person who visited the cafe and the outside world. We thought a good way to physically connect the building with the picture would be to use string and create a similar stitch pattern like the one in the painting.

BBC (2013) Your Paintings, Online: http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/artists/alexei-grigoriev (accessed: 2nd February 2013)

Bennett, Susan (2013) Theatre and Museums, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan

Today, for the first time, I visited the Collection Gallery. We got to look around both galleries which hold to different style of exhibitions in two separate buildings. The one in the Collection provided historical informational which was educational and therefore targeting and appealing to children, especially with the games and dress up sections. The Usher Gallery which looks like a manor house, is the home of paintings, sculptures, plates and clocks. This gallery definitely felt like the most sophisticated out of the two, appealing to an older generation and people interested in art.

Throughout our time here we were given the task to sit or stand in an area of the Collection Gallery and record everything that you see and hear. I chose the cafe as that seemed to be the area which was the most busy and thought it would be interesting to observe what people were talking about and who used the cafe. I found this very successful as I recorded a lot of observations from what the staff did and the noises I could hear, to the observations of what I could see from the cafe when I looked out of the windows. This made me acknowledge the architecture of the building as I was looking around. I realised the cafe was downstairs and not on the same level as the rest of the gallery, which made me think the cafe is a place where visitors or other people not visiting the gallery can come to and get some peace and quiet from their busy schedules. As I looked out of the window I could see a tree with a diamond ring on it and wanted to know what it meant, whether it was meant to be there and why.

My first thoughts of the building opposite the cafe (the education room) made me think the building is like a puzzle as there is so much to explore and what may at first seem accidental could actually have been done purposefully to make you explore the building like you explore the exhibitions in both galleries. As there was a massive space in between the cafe and the building opposite, I could imagine people walking around during a performance like a promenade piece.

The layout of the cafe also made me think about how I felt as a customer at the cafe. Where I chose to sit, by the window in an alcove, I felt hidden and separate from everyone else in the cafe even though the cafe is a big room. This made me think whether other people who visit the cafe notice this feeling too and whether some people decide to sit there to be alone and away from the chaos of the rest of the cafe and even from their busy lives. As a person who spends a lot of time socialising and having a busy schedule, it felt nice to be able to sit alone in a peaceful place and observe everyone around me.

With these observations and thoughts about where the audience could be, could this be a potential performance space?

Author: Francesca Maria Izzo

Initial Ideas

First thoughts to the Collection Gallery