Author: Tom Baines

“STOLEN!”…

Tom Baines / / Concealed Illusions, Development, Research

Shock, horror and bewilderment! The Brayford Painting, which our performance was to be based on was stolen!  Maybe not stolen, but in the room in question where it used to hang is now home to a pencil on paper drawing of the ‘Venus de Milo’.

The ‘Venus de Milo’ is a sculpture statue of the Ancient Greek goddess Aphrodite. Already we are starting to use this as an idea to incorporate into our piece. We are turning the negativity of the painting bring removed and replaced into a positive. The statue itself is a copy/interpretation of a supernatural being so its physical form could be anything. This is the artist’s copy of her. The drawings in the Usher Gallery of her are also copies. Or rather copies of a copy.

My role in the performance is to draw pencil on paper, similar to the ‘Venus de Milo’, the beauty of the girls in my group putting on and taking off their makeup. And therefore creating my own copies of the live art in front of me.

“Life is a work of art…”

Tom Baines / / Concealed Illusions, Development, Experimentation, Research

Upon arriving at our final idea, our group are now starting to begin questioning the integrate details of our piece.  How will the audience react? How will we lead the audience to the piece? What will our integral roles be? Mike Pearson sums up our creative process at this time by saying “Performance involves an activity, an audience and a place, then creative opportunities reside in the multiple creative articulations of us, them and there.” (2010, P19). From this we need to identify and narrow down our key ideas to finalise our project.

This said, our idea has taken shape over the last week.  We have explored more into the concept of masking. As stated by Sam, about the idealisation of many paintings to create a more perfected visual. From this we decided to have ourselves masked but on reflection, we thought that conventional theatre mask would make our site specific performance more theatrical. So we decided to develop the idea of masking but not in a literal sense.

An idea was suggested within our group by Kirsty to have a half make up; have one side what would be deemed as ‘perfect’ and the other side make up free and then during the performance the make-up would be blurred and smudged together to overlap the two showing the idealisation.

 

I then saw this image:

 

 

What if the ‘perfected’ side of the make-up was an idealised face or rather a painting of our own face?

 

Our project is constantly evolving. We had dual projections in both galleries we have now decided to just have the one, above the picture in the Usher gallery. The projection will consist of a video which will subliminally inform the audience of the idealised creativity of painters, and the difference between modern day art and historical art.

 

This idea was later scrapped as our performance was changing it didn’t fit in with the main theme. We steered away from paintings coming to life and concentrated more on idealisation. Not to mention that very soon we were to uncover that the Brayford painting was to disappear…

 

 

Works Cited

Pearson, Mike (2010) Site Specific Performance, Palgrave: Macmillan.

 

 

‘First Impressions’…

Tom Baines / / Concealed Illusions, Research, Space

From our first impressions of ‘The Collection’ it is apparent that there are a large number of spaces, both large and small, that a “Professional stranger” (Govan 2007, p122) can interact with and view with a fresh outsiders perspective.

We began to look at conventional ‘spaces’ from the site such as:

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and

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However we found these to be too stereotypical of an actual theatre space, although their architecture was intricate, interesting and very abstract. We then decided to look at the places within ‘The Collection’ which were less obvious:

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Here we can see even the structure of the building itself poses abstract and interesting thoughts to us as performers. The architecture of the walls continue past the window, instead of the window framing the building. Also the display cabinet is not pushed up against the window which in turn creates an unnoticed and empty space. (modeled beautifully by Sam!).

We sat in this space and listened to the environment around us which was surprisingly loud and vibrant considering a museum is a space for thinking and observing. This small space was filled with the echos of conversations, footsteps and even voices coming from the wall itself. The sound wall stretched across the width of the building with speakers positioned along it; however some of the speakers were hidden in the small, apparently unused space that we occupied behind the cabinet. Which poses the question, why are there speakers placed in an area unused and unnoticed by the public?

From this we are starting to look at the museum’s potential as a performing space and the usual places that are unknown to a stranger’s eye and are asking ourselves, what could happen there?…

 

Works Cited

Govan, Emma and Helen Nicholson and Katie Normington (2007) Making A Performance: Devising Histories and Contemporary Practise. Routledge: London