Thought you’d be interested in this!
http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/9N1Rta/:aphTlUz0:PfGNQjGF/www.turbulence.org/Works/1year/performancevideo.php/
For those doing durational pieces…
////Listening to Conversation
//For our performance we are planning to develop script by listening to conversations. People come to cafes for many different reasons. But no conversation is the same.
Most recently I have heard mostly working conversations among others.
‘He would have been sacked if it were me’ overheard Monday 25th February
‘It don’t think it would be allowed’ ‘maybe it’s worth a try’ overheard Monday 4th March
‘You begin to think I should go to the doctor and then it goes away for half a day and you think, oh I won’t bother then. But you know it will be back tomorrow’ Overheard Monday 4th March
Those are some examples of the conversations I have heard. These were heard in alcoves around the cafe. It would appear that work conversations happen more within the safety of an alcove whereas outside in the open areas of the cafe, more family orientated and gossip conversations take place. I feel that because of the nature of the conversations people feel safer talking about colleagues in a more private space.
Using verbatim within are performance is a strong decision as it can show the thoughts and feelings of the visitors of the gallery cafe. It gives us a good idea of what people come for and what they discuss when they do.
We also put out surveys to ask people questions about why they visited and about what they like about the cafe. Most people had come locally to see the exhibits but a few of the locals come just for stokes cafe itself because of its ‘Relaxing atmosphere’ and ‘Nice coffee’.
‘Verbatim theatre reflects truth differently from other forms of drama’ (McManus, 2010, pg 143) This quote shows how verbatim reflects the truth but it’s the part about how it presents it differently to other forms of drama. I feel that verbatim theatre reflects the real truth as it is a direct projection of the public’s views whereas other forms of drama could be an idealised reality and not a true one. Although verbatim theatre could also bring with it a false truth as you could not have gathered views from every possible view point.
I still believe that verbatim is the right direction for our performance as we have been observing the cafe visitors and feel that verbatim will offer us the chance to give a true representation of these characteristics.
Our group are looking at the types of people who visit the cafe; we want to make each table an exhibition. Taking an area of the gallery that is viewed differently and brings it into a different light. By naming the tables with plaques to draw people’s attention to them we are creating an exhibition of the customers and of the cafe itself. Therefore I think verbatim is an important element of our performance.
McManus, Donald (2010) ‘Great Souls, Big Wheels, and Other Words: Experiments With Truth and Representation in Verbatim Theatre’ in Kiki Gounaridou (Ed) Text and Presentation 2009, United States of Ameria: The Executive Board of the Comparative Drama Conference, pp.141-153.
Music affecting the piece.
//As our group is in the Cafe, many variations can change the mood of our performance.
Whether it be the weather, how many people or the music.
Music effects the tone of the piece, and the Cafe through my many days of me sitting there plays many different types of music.
I believe the classical music played will go with out piece nicely, as an exhibition of art and classical flow well together.
Jazz will make the piece more lively and jarring, with an upbeat tempo our pieces will seem happy, Will the audience in the cafe look around more if the music isn’t relaxing?
The last music I hear was Adele’s album, the music is often about sad relationships, will that make people put a story to out art pieces?
For example some of our exhibits, are people reading alone, another is sipping a coffee alone, will being alone with Adele playing make people think there is a realtionship story to out piece.
If you can imagine those exhibits with that song, a story starts to become for the characters, a story about lost love.
Though we don’t get to choose the music on the day, I believe this will be interesting on how it effects out piece.
Part of our inspiration…
//After the gallery had a re-hanging the painting we were basing our performance around had been taken down. We at first thought this maybe a problem, however the new paintings in the gallery are very useful to our piece. The paintings of the cathedral in the corner of the room is where we are going to put up our model as it highlights the significance of the cathedral in Lincoln and how it is an iconic building in this city. This will mirror how the Big Ben is iconic for London. Another inspiration for us was the dress which is downstairs in the Usher gallery, it is covered in an atlas. We at first thought of covering our model in an atlas or map of London and Lincoln to show the differences between the two cities. However it looked extremely messy and was not as eye-pleasing as the newspapers are.
The construction stage…
//Over the last week as a group we have been constructing our model. This has been very hard and taken a lot of patience and time but it has been worth it giving our end result. We have decided to cover the model in newspaper, using The Telegraph, as this is a London based newspaper and is more relevant. By the end of this week our aim is to have drawn the clock face on the tower and also have it fully covered in newspaper. Also our practice rehearsal in front of the whole class has improved our confidence on the overall piece as the tower made a huge impact in the gallery and even members of the public seemed interested to question what we were doing. The whole group gave us helpful feed back and we have taken the comments on board to make our piece the best it can be.
Here are some more photos of the building process:
