Category: People

So we did our performance…

Shellie-Ann Barrowcliffe / / Evaluation, People

So our exhibit was to be created and presented to the public for them to come and explore the café from our point of view. It was a fun process to help build the exhibit, even though I felt some members of the group did more than others throughout the setting up and deciding where things were going to be placed but it was still great fun. Being trusted to go down to the warehouse to paint the platform on my own felt amazing and for a second I believed I could be an artist as I thought someone would be watching me making sure that I wasn’t doing anything I shouldn’t. It felt nice to be trusted. The setting up process involved going back down to the warehouse underground to collect the platform and various other items that we were allowed to borrow. It was really helpful of The Collection to allow us to use plinths and glass boxes to present our exhibit as it gave it a more professional feel and made it connect and relate more to what was inside the galleries in The Collection. Throughout the setting up process I was really excited with how it was turning out and how it began to look, this was good because a lot of what we wanted to do was dependant on how it worked out on the day. I was really nervous going to The Collection on the Saturday because I knew that it was either going to work or it was all just going to fail but it seems to start off well…

After we spent a few hours setting everything up I was more confident in our piece and was beginning to get really excited. Setting up the education room was fun as we did end up moving it from our original window into the one nearby as we felt like it framed us more and gave us more chances of people seeing us, which it did. In the education room we weren’t sure on how people would react to us if they noticed us. Just as we thought we were finished setting up it started to pour it down with rain, this wasn’t good because most of our piece was outside. However, it seemed to only affect our chalk board which we rewrote before we got into our positions ready to begin and agreed that if it started raining then we would battle through it.

It was amazing to be set up in the education room, not because this was a dry spot but because it allowed me to evaluate peoples reactions to what they were experiencing. It was nice to see how people were reacting to me and Holly being up there because some people would wave to us and as we were having a tea party it felt natural to wave back and smile at them. Some people looked at us confused and didn’t really understand what we were doing but yet we just carried on as we needed to. People weren’t sure what to make of the whole idea as it was bringing something that shouldn’t be there to the space, some people looked confused as their normally space had been took over and they couldn’t understand why.

After our performance ended, I had a lot of mixed feelings. I felt like it hadn’t come to a natural finish and that we should have carried on longer as I didn’t feel like it had properly run its full length of time, it just felt like when you’re watching a movie and it suddenly freezes and it hasn’t come to its correct end. I feel like some members of the group put everything into the performance whereas I personally feel like one member of the group didn’t and the problem is I don’t really understand why. I accept that it might have got boring repeating the same thing over and over for a few hours but we all knew what to expect when we agreed to do this project as a group. I just felt let down that this member didn’t seem to  feel like it was an important project after we had come so far as a group and eventually developed an idea that we all accepted and liked for this one member to then put the effort in just made me disappointed. It was a downside to being up in the education room because I could also observe the flaws within our project and I tried not to let this interfere with my own performance even though sometimes I was getting frustrated.

Evaluating our project as a whole I think that we could have pushed it even further than we did, we could have created several different things for the public to observe and make it into more of a professional gallery, I think it is a shame that we came up with this idea so late on in the project as I didn’t feel that we had enough time to fully develop our idea. If I was to develop it I would make things look even more professional, as though it really had come from inside and was just an extension of The Collection. I would create more standalone items that the audience can come and explore and maybe include an interactive thing like you get inside the galleries so that it appeals not only to adults but also children as well.

Overall it has been a great experience to have been able to do as it gave me another insight into performance however I also feel like it hasn’t been very valuable to me personally.

So? How did it go?

Holly Rudd / / Evaluation, People

I have mixed emotions about how well our final performance went. I feel that some areas of the work really shined and showed off what we wanted people to see, but then I also feel that we lost momentum half way through and therefore lost the drive that was needed to push the performance and keep it going strong.

I feel that performance day itself could have gone better. The group did not seem to have the enthusiasm that you would hope for on performance day. Setting up the exhibit took longer than I had planned due to afore mentioned lack of enthusiasm. Another issue that presented us the morning of our exhibit was the weather, as our piece was outside we hoped for clear skies and glorious sunshine, instead we got the usual British rainy weather, by the time we began running our exhibition at 12pm it had stopped raining and began to warm up a bit, this meant more audience members wandered outside to see what we were up to. I feel if the weather had been sunny initially we may have had a better audience turn out than we actually did. Once we got the piece up and running I started to feel more confident about the group as a whole and the weather.

When we were in place I could see it being a slow start but as we got going the group seemed to work together as a team. As part of the window pair I feel that our performance was well noticed by the audience and received a good response. We had families waving at us for no apparent reason, I took this as a good thing as it meant that people were acknowledging what we were doing and came to get a closer look and see what it was all about. Because of this I think that the window position was a good one to use as it enabled us to attract an audience to the rest of the exhibit.

Our piece lasted for 1½ hours. We were hoping to perform for 2 but unfortunately that was interrupted by unavoidable circumstances. But the hour and a half was plenty of time to gage audience responses.

The audience reacted mostly as I hoped they would, we wanted our audience to come and experience what we had to offer. They could come along view our exhibit and make their own observations about our piece. I feel that this worked successfully due to the way that people responded whilst moving around the exhibition.

‘Audience need not be categorized, or even consider themselves, as ‘audience’’ (Pearson, 2010, pg 175) I feel this quote from Pearson applies to our piece, because we presented a gallery and not so much of a performance; our exhibition was for people to wander around and experience which people did. Therefore our audience could be described as a number of things, spectators, observers, participants, or indeed members of an audience. But because our performance was based around the actions of the public our ‘audience’ could be classed as part of the performance itself presenting everyday pedestrian actions much like we were as a group.

We did however have one couple ask the table groups to stop talking or quieten down. I think this was an interesting response as it’s not a normal response when a performance is going on. But I feel that the idea of site specific encourages these responses. We are coming into a space that is frequented by the general public and we have to be aware that these responses may be likely to occur.

In conclusion I think that our group passed on the messages that we wanted to but the delivery could have been met with more enthusiasm and commitment. If we were to develop the piece, I think that we would extend the opening times to allow more people to view it and have more exhibits for people to view.

 

Pearson, Mike (2010) site-specific performance, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Our assessment.

Francesca Maria Izzo / / Evaluation, People, Public Responses

Our final performance started with panic and worry as the weather in the morning leading up to our performance in the afternoon, was pouring with rain. As our performance was outside it would mean standing and sitting in the rain for two hours and potentially result in no audience members. Luckily however, when we began performing at 12pm, the rain stopped and the sun came out bringing audiences members with it. My role involved standing on a platform in the entrance of the outside seating area with a plinth and chalkboard informing the visitors of our outside cafe exhibition and inviting them to come and have a look:

 

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My role involved speaking quotes I had recorded from the staff members in the cafe. As a majority of the quotes were questions, I decided to say the quotes when visitors walked past or stood and looked at me, to create an interaction with them and highlight the staff members interaction and communication with the customers. As I was asking rhetorical questions and not looking at the visitors when I spoke to them, the reactions I got varied from person to person. For instance, some people looked at me but chose to ignore me, some replied to my questions with their own answers and some avoided walking near me and looking at me to prevent interaction. These observations were similar to the observations my group and I had made of the customers in the cafe. Even though a lot of the passers by acknowledged me and showed an interest there were a few who didn’t want to associate themselves with something unordinary. Like an earlier prediction I made in an earlier blog post, I mentioned we would get interest from children. This happened with a little girl who saw me and when I spoke and repeated questions when they walked past she questioned her family, repeatedly asking them if i was real. This made me think, as I was not acting like a normal person and was just stood still, she thought I was a robot or a statue as I was acting in a conventional, normal way. Children were also interested in the other areas of our performance such as, the cake stand and tea set as they kept going over to the glass plinths and looking at them.

Whilst I was stood on the platform, I was thinking of ways the performance could have been improved. For example, I could have pushed my role further by maybe having some  clear plastic boxes with coin slots on the top labelled ‘REACTED’, ‘IGNORED’ and ‘INTERACTION’ and every time a visitor did one I would put a coin into one of the slots and at the end tally up how many coins were in each box to compare people’s reactions to our performance. Having Shellie and Holly visible in the education room upstairs representing ‘THE MIMIC’ proved successful as a lot of passers by and visitors noticed them and interacted with them by waving and looking into the outside area to see what else was going on. Whilst on the platform I overheard some customers who were sat outside, notice and mention the ‘OBSERVATION’ sign which was on the window above where Gabriel and Jennie were sitting. As a result they then looked around and noticed the ‘MIMIC’ in the window behind them.

Unfortunately, we didn’t have a massive audience and people didn’t use the space as I thought they would. I imagined the visitors to walk around the space like they would in a gallery, moving around and looking at all the artefacts but instead they walked through to get to the cafe and didn’t really stop to look. As Pearson states in Site- Specific Performance, ‘at site the audience may be incidental- those present in the same place at the same time – and obdurate’ (Pearson, 2010, p. 17). Therefore, the audience members were there because they were visiting the Collection Gallery and not specifically to see our performance like they would if the performance was set in an auditorium of a theatre as ‘in the auditorium, the audience is cast as audience: purposefully assembled, expectant, disposed, potentially appreciative.’(Pearson, 2010, p. 17)

I think if we were to do it again we would need to make the exhibition more obvious and create more exhibits for the audience to view and observe. I also think Jennie, Gabriel, me and the empty cafe window would need placards in front of us to demonstrate more what we were trying to do and make it clear we were artefacts in an exhibition. I think we would also need to make more exhibits and make our piece more obvious instead of subtle.

Our original plan was to perform for half an hour and make it a short piece, however, as we didn’t know how many audience members or visitors were going to attend we started our performance at 12pm and finished just after half 1 and therefore Gabriel and Jennie repeated their quotes and we would continue if the outside area was busy. However, by half 1 the cafe wasn’t as busy and we decided to stop.

 

Pearson, M (2010) Site- Specific Performance Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan.

Our final performance

Gabriel / / People

Well it has finally come to our final performance, we have become a long way from our first initial plan of being in the cafe, and tying up the building together.

We turned the outside into an exhibition, even while we were setting up people wanted to know what was going on. At one point we had our other “exhibits” set up, though we weren’t performing as we were getting changed, and I could see people curiously looking and wanting to know what was going on.

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As the women went by it I could see her saying to her husband she did not understand what was going on, it was highly interesting to see that before I went outside to perform.

I believe that the most amazing aspect about site specific is the audience, with ours as there was no set audience just people walking by, and as it was a nice sunny day a lot of people were. There were an interesting mix of interactions from people smiling awkwardly even to one old couple telling us to shut up and it was highly annoying.

(We continued, though that was quite a shock!)

It reminded me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmnaZrQIymU (Lonetwin, 2008)

As with John Stevens, our audience was anyone passing by, and their comments and reactions ended up being part of our performance.

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The audience would see this sign and come in for a closer look before they saw our performance and they would see Fran, Jenny and myself talking to our invisible companions. Then they would look up to see Holly and Shellie having a tea party. It was motion after motion, and I believe they were unsure what to do.

I mentioned in a later post about cafe culture and being in your own personal bubble when you enter one, strangely enough though a lot of people noticed us outside, the people in the cafe’s (though I was seated right next to them just outside) ignored my presence, even though they could glance outside and right next to them I was talking to myself.

Though many people sat at that window seat while I was performing, I did not notice a single person look up from their conversation or book. Even though at times I was mirroring them with my timing of turning my page of my book, and putting my book down. Yet they were completely oblivious as they were in their own cafe bubble.

As an exhibit it was quite a success! With many people having their interests piqued in our little gallery.

I believe it could have been easily very different, with no one paying much attention at all but because we were performing on a hot Saturday afternoon at lunchtime, many people stopped and ended up becoming part of our piece. I would be interested to see if people would have bothered stopping to take a closer look at us if it was raining or cold.

Site Specific was an incredibly interesting performing piece, one I would like to experiment again with some day.

Bibliography:

Lonetwin, (2008). Town Crying: My name is John Stevens. [online video] available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmUn2ZTzeY0 [accessed 06/05/2013]

 

Evaluation of Final Performance

Jennie Chapman / / Evaluation, People

After finally performing our piece the other day, I have mixed feelings as to whether it was a success. On the whole I think it went well and enjoyed being a part of the group and my part in the performance. However, if we were to do it again, I think improvements could be made.

Considering the amount of changes and alterations we have gone through for our performance, what we eventually came to was simple yet what we wanted to achieve in the beginning; turning the cafe into an exhibition. Along with our static exhibits, the cake stand and the tea set, we successfully ‘performed’ as a Collection of People. Myself, Fran and Gabriel reciting quotes and conversations we have listened to which has been a great element to our performance from the weeks of research and experimentation of this module and Holly and Shellie performing their mimic of the cafe demonstrating the activity we have also observed in the cafe.

For me, this performance has been the strangest one yet in terms of how and where it was performed. The cafe already being open and the museum itself, we were waiting around to begin our performance. Although we said that we would start at midday, it did not feel like the start of a performance unlike it would if we were doing it in a studio or on stage but then again this is to be expected. One reason why I think this was was because we did not have a standing audience, our audience were the people who happened to be around or in the cafe at that time, which is what we wanted and achieved. I found that the people who did see us were hesitant to engage with what was happening particularly with myself, Fran and Gabriel, proof of this came when a couple asked us to stop! However, some spectators did engage by waving up at Holly and Shellie  and I heard others ask each other what it was about which in a way is a compliment as it shows that people were trying to understand our performance.

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“It is tangible, uncomplicated, unitary: all that legitimizes and validates acts of theatre. It may as a result be barely accounted for and under-represented within the purview of historiography” (Pearson, 2010, p192).

This quote from Pearson is speaking of the after math of a site specific performance. He says that performances go unnoticed and undocumented; they do not cause a huge stir among the public. This I can understand, however, I feel that this is because site specific performance is unique and has no boundaries. To have been apart of a learning experience like this, I have been able to experiment and undertake new practices, which is what site specific performance is about according to Pearson. It is not to prove a thesis it is to “encourage further initiatives in performance” (Pearson, 2010,p2).

Our work at The Collection may have only been small and experimental and I would like to expand on it, but it has been something different and intriguing to me as it has given me a greater knowledge and understanding of contemporary performance. The development and process of this piece has been challenging and complicated at times, however, I am happy with how it has turned out overall. If I were to do our performance again, I think I would like to take our performance further by making it more of a durational piece of work and also emphasise the idea of the cafe being in itself an exhibition as a I think we could have made our idea much stronger than it was. As well as this, I would hope to improve areas of the process in order to further inspire, communicate and encourage spectators to see this site from a new perspective.

Works Cited:

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