Possessed Time – Page 4 – The Collection Of…

The Challenges of Durational Performances

Stephanie Jackson / April 9, 2013May 12, 2013 / Possessed Time

Durational performances can be an effective means through which to communicate conflicting or challenging ideas to an audience, over a prolonged period. This may be through subtle changes during the piece or obvious and deliberate interventions.

Emma Govan, Helen Nicholson and Katie Normington state how:

‘such performances often highlight a difference between the physical capability and limitations of the body.‘

(Govan, Nicholson, Normington, 2007, p.160)

This ‘physical capability’ will ultimately effect the outcome of any performance, as actors need to maintain a certain degree of fitness to enable them to have the stamina and focus to carry out a durational piece of theatre.

As performers ourselves, we will have to be aware of the exhaustion that may occur during our 6 hour performance.

‘As the actor tires, the audience sees the real characteristics of the actor themselves- their exhausted, unobliging body attempting to undergo a task.’

(Govan, Nicholson, Normington, 2007, p.161)

This exhaustion will be most prominent in our intense mimes which will each last continually for 15 minutes, as we ‘undergo a task’ of representing our daily morning routine.

So why challenge ourselves with a 6 hour piece?

Quite simply, our piece is about time and the constraints that time plays upon us, not just as performers but in our daily lives. It therefore makes sense for our work to develop over a period of 6 hours- a quarter of a day. As discussed in the points above, time will effect us through our own tiredness and exhaustion.

Many practitioners and companies use durational pieces to impose their ideas on the audience. One example, is Forced Entertainment whose 1993 work ’12am: Awake & Looking Down’, lasted over a prolonged period in which 5 silent performers encompassed different identities throughout the duration. The audience were free to come and go as they pleased, witnessing different interactions and relationships between each of the performers. This is similar to what we hope our piece will achieve; as we will have no fixed audience, and our interactions will differ throughout the 6 hours.

Another artist Marcia Farquahar, presented a durational performance in 2010 called ‘The Omnibus’. Here her performance lasted for 30 hours, with each hour representing one year through which she presented everything that had happened since the late 1970s.

The Guardian writer Lyn Gardiner writes in her theatre blog, that ‘through time, the life becomes the work, or that the two are inseparably intertwined.’ This can be applied to our site specific work, and the discussion of at which point does something become a performance. Afterall, isn’t all life a performance? Throughout our own piece and the 6 hours, audience and performer will also become ‘intertwined’ to a certain extent, as they impose on our space and become part of our piece.

Works Cited

Govan, Emma, Nocholson Helen, Normington, Katie, Making a Perfromance: Devising Histories and Contemporary Practises. Routledge, 2007

Gardiner, Lyn, When theatre is the time of your life, guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog

Can a ‘Non-Place’ Exist?

Shane Humberstone / April 5, 2013May 13, 2013 / Possessed Time, Research, Space

‘If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place’ (Augé 1995, p. 77), if a building possesses ‘non-place’ characteristics then it is there to only serve a purpose rather then add something to a community or an area.

In an ever growing fast paced world, the essence of character and legacy can be seen as depleting and being replaced by service based infrastructure that holds no personality, such as airports and shopping malls. These places are blamed for setting people up on the mundane conveyor belt of life. These places have no character and they do not create experiences or provoke emotion such as churches or battle grounds. It is worth mentioning that a ‘place’ or a ‘non-place’ does not necessarily have to be a building but any area of space, like a motorway for example.

Although I agree that when the essence of the past is present in a building, or a room or even a road, it does create a different atmosphere and a sense of identity. We all know of that back road to that certain place that has the really scary trees and the old broken wooden fence running alongside it, which fills us with memories and atmosphere every time we drive down it, and often we give it an identity by naming it. In turn it is evident that modern places still have their own stories and are filled with people who have their own experiences. An airport can be perceived as ‘Everyday spaces of Late-Capitalist cities’ (Coyne), can be seen as a vacuous filtering system of people, or you could look at the individuals. Each passenger has their own story of why they are there and their own influence on the space. People develop memories and experiences at airports all of which add to the identity and character of the place. Furthermore, the members of staff that work there every day become part of the building and bring a whole new type of character to the building. The beautiful thing about these large places, filled with forever changing people, is that they can be filled with so much more experience and character than any historical site, and on top of that they have the ability to change their identity so significantly and so often, which makes them more of a ‘place’ than a lot of the places Augé would perceive as a ‘place’.

When first looking into Gallery 3 at the Usher gallery you see all these pieces of art and watches with an abundance of history and fascinating stories, which simply epitomises the idea of a ‘place’. Despite this, if you think about it closer, Gallery three is just another gallery conforming to what can only be perceived as a normal museum gallery. It is dark, small and has little writing explain the stories which would indeed truly make it a ‘Place’, compared to the Collection, it can be perceived as somewhat flaccid and thus has another product of what museums should be.

‘Place and non-place are rather like opposed polarities: the first is never completely erased, the second never totally completed…’ (Augé 1995, p. 79), this not only insists that there is hope for our airports to one day been seen as a ‘place’, but also our fully cultured, fully historical churches once started off as a ‘non-place’ and still contains ‘non-place’ characteristics. Moreover, this shows that a building will never reach its full identity, its context and essence can only ever grow. I believe that the speed in which a ‘non-place’ can become a ‘place’ is heavily down to the acceptance of the build in the community, alongside with its actual aesthetic beauty. Take a motorway for example. A town may totally hate it because it has left a ‘scar’ on the landscape and has no positive externalities for that town, whereas it could actually be seen as a compliment to that town and become a big part of it, not only bringing ease of access to that town but also, in time, it can build a new history more fulfilled history and new experiences made with journeys taken on it.

Airports can be seen as a plain large glass blister on the earth just ferrying people in and out, but these people give them more character than any type of brick or mystical stories. I disagree with those who think that airports or shopping malls are ‘non-places’ because they do not ‘identify a loss of personal identity’, or a, ‘decline in meaningful relations amongst the users of spaces’ (Coyne). Despite this it can easily be argued that each member of staff sees each customer as just another number. In turn each customer can see the staff as just mere faces of the company they may be dealing with, ‘The non-place is the opposite of utopia: it exists, and it does not contain any organic society’ (Augé 1995, p. 111-112). Although I still believe, and have experienced, that people in these places genuinely want to help you and create an experience for you which may not be received from a ‘place’ steeped in cultural history, because of the vast size of these spaces, and the volume in which people are dealing with, going to these ‘non-places’ can be seen as a process as opposed to an experience.

Essentially i do not think ‘non-places’ really ever exist, no matter how young the space is, people are forever having influence on everywhere they go and these ‘places’ never have a chance to be a ‘non-place’. Our task is to see if we can re-insert life back into Gallery 3 and give it an extra story to tell.

Written by: Shane Humberstone

Works Cited:

Augé, Marc (1995) Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe, London and New York: Verso.

Coyne, Richard Orienting the Future: Design Strategies for Non-Place, Online: http://www.design21.dundee.ac.uk/PDF/NonPlace.pdf (accessed 3 April 2013)

Automaton Movement

Chloe Doherty / March 25, 2013May 13, 2013 / Development, Experimentation, Inspiration, Possessed Time, Research

Having been given feedback after showing a snippet of our durational performance to the class, it occurred to us that we may not be able to continue referring to what we are doing as falling under the sub-title of ‘miming.’

mime
/mīm/

Noun
The theatrical technique of suggesting action, character, or emotion without words, using only gesture, expression, and movement.

Verb
Use gesture and movement without words in the acting of (a play or role).

By no stretch of the imagination are we attempting to create characters, or emotion through our incorporation of choreographed mechanical gestures. Our use of costumes will suggest a time of day, opposed to that of a fictional characters wardrobe. The gestures which we have constructed consist of ordinary movements which everyone inevitably comes across throughout the duration of their day. We will include one simple action for each period and repeat it over the course of 15 minutes at a time. The gestures being the hand moving to and from the face with a clenched fist (brushing teeth), both hands with open palms moving up and down in front of the face simultaneously (face washing) and lastly a cupped hand, whilst the other moves to the mouth and back down again (eating breakfast).

Our intention is to show the effects which a structured concept comes across when exposed to the notion of time. Repeating the same action for a period of time obviously much longer than intended can turn something very ordinary into something abstract, some might even say into a piece of art, much similar to those on show in both The Usher Gallery and The Collection. Although this may seem like quite a laborious task, it’s incredibly intriguing to see how warping such a simple thing like the amount of minutes it takes to brush your teeth can have on your outlook on the gesture used, the movements incorporated or even how strenuous it may be to experiment with something so unnatural.

When choreographing the movements which we decided to use, we tried to keep in mind the soundtrack to our piece, and our chosen galleries theme; the ticking of a clock. In order for a clock to create a sound, the cogs inside of it must be working together both effectively and efficiently together. In The Usher Gallery there is a skeleton clock on show, where all of the cogs are extremely visible. We hope to achieve the same kind of structure that a clock holds by the use of our mechanical gestures.

Automatons are a self-operating machine. They adopt a series of movements, or sometimes even just the one key gesture (similar to that shown above). The mechanisms inside of each automaton are similar to that of a clock, and are even used to produce to ‘cuckoo’ in a cuckoo clock. Automatons take a gesture which we are familiar with and have the tools to distort how we view it, their fixed facial expression and lack of inhibition express no life like characteristics, yet are still created with a somewhat human appearance and the ability to mimic a human gesture.

So, rather than us disregarding the use of props in order to create a convincing mime, we are currently experimenting with the use of mechanical expression. That being said, we fully intend on exploring what it will look like to use the same task, with the ‘robotic’ movements, whilst attempting to incorporate relevant props.

Author: Chloe Doherty

Our Mime Endurance Trial…..of brushing teeth!!

Stephanie Jackson / March 11, 2013May 12, 2013 / Development, Experimentation, Possessed Time

In todays workshop, our group put into practise our ideas on the structure and timing of our piece. The opening section of our performance will consist of us going about our daily routine, of waking up, brushing our teeth, washing our face and eating breakfast. We have chosen a simple movement that represents each of these acts, however we are doing each action for 15 minutes. This will dehumanise a simple every day action, and the audience will not be expecting us to maintain such simple movements over a durational period. As we are going to be using our bodies to portray an action, and due to the duration of our piece, it is important to research into physical theatre and mime traditions. Simon Murray and John Keefe write:

‘the physical actions of the body still remain those of the everyday body. These may be stylised or contorted or otherwise heightened but the body remains the same somatic, corporeal ‘thing’ that it can only be. The actions are mimetic of the everyday but outside the everyday or habitual.’

(Murray Simon, Keefe John, Physical Theatres: A Critical Introduction,Taylor and Francis 2007)

The reason we have chosen to mime is because we feel that it fits more with the aesthetics of the space. We can’t justify having real props such as toothbrushes and doing it for real, because it would too out of place. During the sections when we mime eating, the reason for us not having real plates and cutlery is that the Gallery is filled with household crockery. They are meant for practical use but they are kept behind glass for display only. Our mime is demonstrating the essence of the action we are portraying without the materialistic element, because the material objects are prevented from our use by the glass cabinets in the Gallery.

So would our mime work and would it be effective? The only way to find out was to practically do it.

With each of us focusing and remaining in silence, with only the sound of a ticking clock to accompany us, we began to mime brushing our teeth. We each did different speeds, but maintained timing with the clock. This required so much concentration and perseverance on our part as performers, as within a few minutes our arms began to ache and the repetitive nature became quite mentally challenging to keep going.

After 15 minutes of non stop repetitive mime, an alarm dictated us to change into our next movement of face washing. This was equally as challenging and required mental strength and endurance to keep us motivated and focused. We received comments afterwards from our fellow students who had watched us. They remarked on how effective it was and the energy that the repetitive nature evoked in the room. We learnt as performers how a subtle movement can become enlarged and surreal just by repeating it, and the endurance and skill that is required to keep up a mime like that. I think we need to develop this further and perhaps experiment with different actions in the space, as the space itself can change the way an action is perceived. Will our mime be more effective if we all stood in a line, or at different levels within our space? Do we face into the cabinets or to our audience? These are questions which will become answerable as we develop our work further.

Works Cited

Murray Simon, Keefe John, Physical Theatres: A Critical Introduction, (Taylor and Francis 2007)

The Pineapple Experiments

Stephanie Jackson / March 10, 2013May 12, 2013 / Development, Experimentation, Possessed Time

As with all practical performances and projects, we have been experimenting with ideas to see what works and can be used in our final piece. Trial and error is an important part of our practical development.

We watched footage of fruit decomposing, and liked the idea of how time can effect an object very visually, with photography and media as a means of recording time itself. The next stage of this was having to decide how we could do this ourselves in the simplest and most practical way. We discussed leaving a pineapple in a shed or somewhere uninterrupted, where we could focus a camera on it and film its decomposition. The significance of the pineapple is that it is a feature of our chosen performance space of Gallery 3.

However, this caused us practical concerns, and raised many questions over how long it would take to decompose and whether we could get a camera for that amount of time.

Instead we decided to cut a pineapple in half and see what would happen if we left it in a cupboard for a few days and took a few photos over the duration.

Would it change its appearance over one weekend? Or would it take weeks for any effects to take place?

This is the experiment I am recording so far. And this is the result after 3 days of a pineapple in my cupboard…….

This is a simple stop-frame style animation I have created of the decomposition process so far. As you can see, the pineapple has started to change texture and colour. Something visual such as this, could be used as an aid in our final performance piece to show the effects that time can have.