“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.

Trying it out..

Samantha Mckenzie / / Concealed Illusions, Development, Experimentation, Public Responses, Uncategorized

‘People had a real familiarity with the space that was being worked with yet they were invited to experience the environment from a new perspective due to the performance that was enacted within it.’ (Govan 2006, p.122)

On 18th March, after many weeks of experimentation and development of our ideas, we were given the opportnity to test out a section of our performance in front of members of the class and any other members of the public who happened to be visiting the Usher Gallery. It was vital for us to get some feeback from our peers so we could be assured we were moving in the right direction, see that our performance communicates as we hoped or learn where/what we were lacking. There were particular areas in which we felt may not reflect the ideas behind them accuratley. For example, during our experimentation process with makeup, we were fascinated by the appearance of a dirty make up wipe and how something which appears so perfect initially, eventually descends into a filthy rag.

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To reflect this in our performance we came up with an idea which would also decide our choice of costume. We wanted to show side by side the result we are looking for by applying makeup and also the substance that is left afterwards. This resulted in our desicion to wear white clothing during our piece and use this to remove the makeup rather than the conventional products; metaphorically becoming giant makeup wipes. What we hoped would become clear after this was our intention to reveal the negativity behind masking the real thing or becoming something idealised; which you are not. When we tried this out on the day we were pleased with the feedback we recieved and also how our audience began to think over what we hoped they would. For example they were struck by the duration of time in which it took us to apply the makeup and we were happy they picked up on this because our general approach is to show something real and everyday using the real time scale. We felt successful in delivering the message we intended to.

We are now trying to push our piece to the right standard leading up to the performance day which will mean more experimentation in the Usher Gallery ensuring we are happy with what we are revealing and where we are doing it. Ideally we would love for our audience to enjoy seeing something new and different in the art gallery but also appreciate its coherance with the rest of the art work.

 

Work cited

Govan, E., et al (2006) Making a Performance:
Devising Histories and Contemporary Practices, London and New York: Routledge

 

 

‘Putting the pieces together’

Tabitha Hilton-Berry / / Development, Experimentation, Possessed Time

As part of our final performance, we have decided to incorporate a teamwork exercise of putting together a puzzle, which will reflect the work of James Ward Usher’s clock collection and his ideas on industrialism. Our piece displays a condensed working day in to a six hour performance that will provide the experience of each significant task that we perform every day in our daily routine, highlighting the time it takes and how it is an integral part of our day-to-day lives. As Dion Boucicault remarks “Men talk of killing time, while time quietly kills them.” We do not appreciate or realise the time in which we waste performing important but mundane tasks as it becomes second nature to us, therefore, this is one of the points we try to accentuate in the durational piece.

The reason that we have decided to include a puzzle in our performance is because we wanted a section of the performance to contain a teamwork aspect that could reflect the mechanism of the inside of a clock. All the components have a part to play in order for the clock to become fully functional in which each of our group represents.

We have decided to use 9 carpet tiles measuring a square metre each as the material for the puzzle in which we will draw a skeleton/outline of a clock onto before we cut the tiles into puzzle pieces. The carpet tiles we have chosen are a light beige colour which contrasts to the dark midnight blue flooring and walls in Gallery 3. This will make the puzzle solving stand out to the audience and will require us all to work together as if we were in a factory assembling a clock for production.

               puzzle

The process of putting the puzzle together will be the imitation of our work/job in a factory of producing clocks and will take 90 minutes to complete, including a 15 minute working lunch break in the middle.
There have been some slight difficulties with the process of cutting the carpet tiles into puzzle pieces as the base that the carpet sits on is a thick plastic which, although it will be more convenient for putting the puzzle back together, it poses the problem of cutting them out to begin with. For this, we had to purchase Stanley knives which are specifically used for cutting carpet tiles and have proved to be a much easier solution for the task.

We are still in the process of discovering if the puzzle will work in the piece as it is quite a daunting task putting together a puzzle that we have created ourselves but we feel that it is an integral part of the performance.

The Challenges of Durational Performances

Stephanie Jackson / / 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

Performance Development…

Samantha Mckenzie / / Concealed Illusions, Development, Inspiration

When creating a performance piece, there are always going to be complications and ongoing changes. Sometimes something unexpected happens which changes the general direction of the piece; or helps continue its’ development. Clearly, because our performance site is a museum/art gallery, constant renewal and re-evaluation is going to take place. Due to rehanging in the gallery rooms and replacement of particualar sculptures or paintings the whole atmosphere and style may alter from time to time. This is mirrored by my group’s developing ideas and how our initial inspiration has evolved into something much more solid.

I feel that we are extremely lucky to be performing in a space which blends so nicely with theatre and performance ‘Demographic analyses of cultural activity show that people who go to the theatre, concerts, and movies are also museum visitors’ (Bennett 2013, p.5). It has been an opportunity for us to take something traditional and static and bring it to life; giving it energy and a sense of contemporary culture. Combining theatre and hanging art work together means that we have been able to analyse how a painting is already performing in a sense and put those details under a magnifying glass. For example, our initial idea stemmed from a painting being idealised and has developed into something real and live which is a person masking their face with makeup; so essentially being something which they are not. This is also where our discussion on instagram grew from because it is something which exists in a modern culture; it’s current and it’s now. We found it interesting to link back to the way in which an 18th century painting has been idealised with a tool which people use today to idealise photographs of themselves.‘Yet museums traffic mostly in material designated as representing the past, while theatrical performance takes place resolutely in the present,'(Bennett 2013, p.5) .

As I have written in previous posts, we initally planned our piece based around the painting of The Brayford Pool and Lincoln Cathedral (1858).

llr_lcnug_1927_2686_large Our main concensus links back to the idealisation of the painting and its’   superior positioning in the gallery. We planned for this to be our focal point and explanation behind our ideas. After speaking to members of staff in the Usher Gallery we were assured that the painting would stay hanging as it was even with changes within the gallery. However, unfortunatley when we were last in the building we discovered that the painting had been taken down due to further rehanging in that particular gallery. This caused our development process to come to a slight hault. We questioned the relevance of our current performance ideas without it but came to the conclusion that although our piece may have been inspired initially by that particular painting, it does not mean that it cannot share relevence with paintings as a general. We’re working with the idea of masking and revealing and the fact that we’re performing in an art gallery, regardless of what art work is there, still remains effective. After our initial panic, we took note of the irony which is the original painting’s replacement. Now hanging in the gallery room is a painting of Venus de Milo, an acient greek statue of Aphrodite- the goddess of love and beauty. Not only is it a painting of a sculpture; which is something neither live or the ‘real thing’, but it is also fitting how she represents beauty and we are going to be applying make-

venus-de-milovenus_milo

up throughout our piece. In a way the painting has been changed at just the right time in our creating process because we have reached a point where we are sure of what we want to show and reveal, and actually now this new painting fits better than the original one. We still plan to project a photograph of the Brayford pool painting above where it used to hang to illustrate the progression of art through time and to link all of our new and old inspirations together.

 

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