Author: Alicia Visram Cipolletta

Overall I think the performance went well and we appreciated the staff and audience bravely questioning our choices at the end. Our feedback was intriguing as the audiences main focus was our role in the performance, yet they loved the bringing in of our balloons for the escapism and hope feel to the end of our piece and found it refreshing. One element I would change, or work on, was the flimsiness and weakness of our boxes. We spent a lot of time practising out how the boxes should be stacked, as whenever we created our wall, each time a different box would not hold. After continuing to label and colour coordinate our boxes into sequences for steadiness and balance, in the end we concluded that once the first layer of stable, strong boxes were placed, our choices above could be random and unsystematic. We hoped for the best with this as having a certain structure created issues and we ended up over thinking our wall.  Another thing I noticed was the audiences hesitation to enter our space whilst we were performing. Our tutor initially knew to freely enter our space yet the audience where unaware whether they were allowed to or not. However once people risked the capability to walk where they please and came in our performance space around us, I can assume the audience felt more comfortable being somewhere they can walk freely and watch us. (As if we were part of the gallery).

Our performance title; Nova Inventa sums up our performance. New Discoveries is about us taking a space and allowing it to be used to its maximum potential. To the audience, the space would be a discovery in itself, and we would transform it to bring something that would make the space actual artwork. I feel that we have come along way from devising a piece of movement that started off with army figurines and messages in balloons. We had originally looked at 5 different overlooked spaces and I am glad we narrowed it down to 2. Whilst we potentially lost out, we gained a better idea of our responses to the space and our intentions to the audience through the use of the parallel sides.

The practitioner Mike Pearson, discuses the relationship between archaeology and performance. He states that for the performer it is a ‘series of physical, sensual and extra-daily experiences as alterations of perception and life strategies which may or may not be made explicit to the spectator, as sequences of tension, relaxation, and acceleration, changes of consequence and innovation.’. I feel like this quote resembles our attitude towards our performance, and how we are inviting the unprepared audience to our invasion of space and our concept of breaking the monotony of life.
During our performance we walk from our main side space in the contemporary gallery to its twin space on the other side, whilst the Collection itself is known for its quietness, stillness, and relaxing atmosphere, we immediately agreed on invading the rooms with us walking through with our boxes. Whilst we were robotic and cold to the spectators who did not know how to respond to us, our walking was peaceful and calm as we transferred the boxes between the spaces. To conclude our assessment concerning our twin performance spaces, we thought it was aesthetically pleasing to use the bringing down and revealing aspect to both sides.

In order to not deter the attention from the colourful balloons at the end, we dressed in black to create the allusion that we were not the centre attraction. The black tied in with the crosses on each box and the colourful paint we used contrasted well against the dark colours. Whilst the roman numerals played their own part, our sporadic and random place choices, for them allowed the audience to see our gradual breaking away from the conventional ‘routine’. We changed quite a bit over the last week, including the material used to write on the boxes. We went from scratchy black markers to colourful paints. Red and blue were the favourites, but due to there being 4 of us, we included other colours. These colours matched our balloon colours as an insignificant yet highly detailed link within our performance. The idea of the thin brush strokes and the effect it created on the cardboard immediately caught our attention and we stuck with the idea. We liked the contemporary feel and felt that our piece would coincide with the art surrounding our space.

We chose to not have our performance as a durational piece as we felt that if we performed over several hours, our walking through the gallery would become tiresome and not as intriguing. We also changed the idea of Tequila reading the poem, to all of us speaking. To prevent ourselves from messing up the words and ruining the effect of the piece, we recorded our poem with people coming in and speaking in a canon formation. This gave the impression of time never ending as when one person finished, others would still be speaking. We had it recorded so that it was playing in the background for dramatic effect. It was played 3 times, at the start, whilst we painted the roman numerals, and at the end, before we revealed our object. We felt that this created a cyclical feel to our performance and gave our piece depth. Doing our performance also within half an hour allowed our performance to appear blunt and something that shouldn’t be overlooked itself. Whilst the audience did not travel with us on all our transferring journeys, they all appeared at the end, wanting to see if we had a dramatic ending. In order to prolong the revealing of our balloons we replayed the voice-over poem in the back ground as we stood around the last box. This kept the audience anticipating our next move and whether we would even reveal our objects in the space. Once we had revealed our symbols of hope, we allowed the audience to view the space and reminisce over the importance and significance of our piece, especially in relation to the space.

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

Whilst playing around with our objects that could possibly reveal our space; egg carton cups and shoe boxes, we only just took notice of the art featured already in the space. Jan Ijas’ ‘Two Islands’ is a film about two enormous waste dumps in New York City – Staten Island and Hart Island – and explores the notion of the contemporary landfill as an archaeological deposit.

Coincidently this film talks about the boxes used as coffins that people were put in who had no one to claim them. We felt this tied in well with our use of boxes to reveal a space and therefore played around with the idea of writing fragmented words on the boxes. We originally started with the obvious; ‘baby #1’, ‘old man’, ‘the lost’ which did not come through to the audience as we intended, it was too obvious and they felt we were feeding them what we were exploring. We discussed words that tie in the confined spaces we are using and the gloomy tone that the film possesses; ‘controlled’, ‘restricted’ and ‘suffocated’. Whilst we had so many ideas for the one space, its twin on the parallel side of the building needed to be brought into our performance, unfortunately its aesthetics are not as good and we struggled to find inspiration in the space.  For that reason, we focused our attention on the initial space and hoped that as the rehearsals and explorations went on we would come across the purpose for the second space.

At the same time as working on the space we were interested in the idea of incorporating a poem in the background to play with our performance; we looked at the things that people would have missed out from who died in Ijas’ film and created a short poem;

“Life reduced to refuse, Isn’t there more than this? The Lost, forgotten, no names no faces, just a date, time and place. Life reduced to numbers. It started as one, then came more, Too many to count. Nothing but a mass grave. One. Two. Three. Four…”

This poem enabled us to explore into more ideas of things that would fit nicely into our poem;

“Hairbrushes, dollies, brand new frocks. Dentist visits, tears, knee high socks. Late night dinner, eavesdropping, being a great fried. Doing what you love, midnight calls, knowing what’s around the bend.”

This part of the poem was inspired from our ideas of, similarly to our space, things that are overlooked and forgotten about in a person’s life. Important things that we take for granted when we grow up. We decided it would definitely be used, and we possibly liked the idea of Tequila standing behind the boxes, reading the poem and being the object of revelation.