Time to develop ideas

Shellie-Ann Barrowcliffe / / Development, Experimentation, People, Public Responses

After discussion we decided that we wanted to use another space in The Collection, the education room that looks out onto the Café. This was because we thought it would be good as it was an example of how the two buildings could be together yet they are apart. It was also another thing to do with our research and how children mimic what they see in society and in cafes. Children notice things that adults don’t. We decided it would be a good idea for some members of the group to have a tea party up in the education room, acting like children and using a child’s tea set. We experimented trying out lots of things whilst the rest of the group sat in the café and suggested to us afterwards what worked and didn’t work. Throughout this process we felt it was more natural for us to start as children but by the end become business women who were professional. Whilst we were doing this in the education room, the rest of the group aimed to create an exhibition down in the café and present all of the things that people might not notice but we had noticed over the past few weeks. After experimenting with this exhibition idea it was clear that it needed to be pushed even further as it just wasn’t working but again we had to take into account that it was still as business…
This was beginning to not seem a great place after all.

We showed our performance ideas so far to the rest of the groups and received great feedback for the tea party in the education room and got told things such as

“once you watch your intrigued that you need to keep watching to see what happens next”
“it’s a really good idea”
“it works well, maybe make more of it”

This was really positive for us as we wasn’t sure if it was going to make an impact or not. Most importantly we wasn’t sure if we could be seen clearly enough but it seemed to work ok, this wasn’t the same for the café however as the idea we hadn’t didn’t really work well and so needed to be rethought. As well as this exhibition we had the other three group members in the café talking to themselves using a verbatim script that had been creating through listening to peoples conversations. This seemed to get lost so we discussed our whole idea and decided to see what the effect would be if we took this outside. We weren’t sure if this would work as we were taking it out of its original setting, out of the café atmosphere and outside. So taking this outside and trying it out it felt like something was missing, it lacked energy and needed something to back it up. Still wanting to keep the education room idea we discussed whether there was a way that we could link outside and the education room. In the end it was suggested that maybe we could attempt to create our own exhibition outside and portraying our version of the important things in the café.
Our ideas included:

• Having the three people sat at their own individual table talking to themselves, one would portray ‘the reader’ another ‘the working man’ and the third would portray ‘the family man’ as these are the three characteristics that we picked up on most throughout our research.
• Taking pictures and creating a framed piece up on the wall of the café, and showing how it changes throughout the day.
• Having the sentences we had heard wrote in chalk down the stairs to create something different
• Using the placard idea from inside and seeing how that worked.

Working Progress

Jennie Chapman / / Development, People

The feedback we received from our working progress has been very helpful. Before the feedback our ideas about our performance had been unclear and confusing as to what we were trying to show. There were positives to the feedback such as the strong image in the upstairs windows and at first people did not realise what was going on. One of the main issues that came up was that there needed to be a stronger connection between the two happenings and a much stronger link to the café overall. Our idea of making the café an exhibition was positive however the feedback made us realise that there needed to be more to the whole idea as it was getting lost in and among the other ideas. We need to focus specifically on the objects and the people in the café, as to how we will do this is the question. Our discussion afterwards brought the idea of making everything in the café an exhibit by placing placards on the tables, plants, walls and windows, with quotes from the conversations we have overheard and the people we have seen.

Another question that has developed from this session was how we are marketing the performance and more importantly the question of our audience; where do we want them? What time do we want them? Our performance has no precise finish; we don’t want a standing, static audience that crowds the café. I think that if we think about our audience more carefully, then it will help us rethink our performance and perhaps make our idea clearer. We have discussed the idea of our performance being similar to an installation.

“Usually it is three- dimensional, temporary and can be entered and possibly interacted with by its audience/spectators.”

“Like environmental theatre and site specific performance, installation art compels its audiences to reflect on the meanings and histories of its site” (Allain and Harvie, 2006, p 162-163)

This way we can think more carefully about our performance, knowing the details about what our audience will be like.

Works Cited:

Allain, Paul and Jen, Harvie (2006) The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance, London: Routledge.

P e r f o r m a n c e snippit

Eloise Grace Henshaw / / Development, Nova Inventa

After all of the bizzarre things we have tried out (see other members of the group’s blogs for more detail), we thought in preparation for our performance, we could share with you a brief outline of our script.

Not revealing too much…

 

________________________________________________________

Hairbrushes, dollys and  brand new frocks

Dentist visits, tears and knee high socks

Late night dinner, eavesdropping, being a great friend

doing what you love, midnight calls and knowing what’s around the bend

sight seeing, grazed knees, crying tears of joy

cigarettes, make up sex, the excitement of a girl or boy

nameless faces, finding your lover, learning things anew

building foundations, learning from mistakes and being sad when it’s through

office chairs, nails clippers and doing a job you hate

interlocking fingers, building blocks, loving some one when it’s too late.

Hide and Seek, bed time tales, making a den

New school jumpers with hair to match, – biggest worries when ten.

Missing the cracks, taking a risk, telling the time

Seeing to believe, storm clouds, forgetting the punch line

Stability

Loyalty

Something to call my own

There’s no place like home

one breath, that’s all it took

_____________________________________________

 

We took inspiration from the installation found in the space that we are using for our performances.

Even during the first week at the collection, one of the things that I found added to the atmosphere of the collection was the sound wall, found in the main entrance. As you can see from the blog posts from the other members of the group, we experimented with sensory ideas, such as releasing marbles down the stairs in order to create a loud echoing noise that was almost unsettling in the space in which it was done.

After we decided that we would no longer be using all five spaces around The Collection and The Usher Gallery, we still used the ideas of the sound wall and a voice over in our piece.

 

“Cleansing the idea”…

Kirsty Taylor / / Concealed Illusions, Development

After weeks of development and idea forming we wanted to think about how we would be involved in the performance and more specifically how we would look. Initial idea’s included ‘bring the painting to life’ and dressing as if we had come from the painting, however as our thoughts have progressed and changed this is no longer relevant. Then from discussions with the public and the realisation that our focal painting was indeed an idealised image, this brought the idea of somehow masking our faces as a reflection of the masking of reality. The obsession with beauty has become more and more important in society over time and has also been particularly important to art, “What is beautiful is felt to be perfect, exquisite, the finest, and the most harmonious; there is always a quality of the ideal with beauty” (2012, p177). There has always been a desire for perfection but who decides what is perfect or not and is it really necessary?

Although at first we thought using actual masks could be used, we soon found using other less conventional ways would work more to our advantage and complement the piece much more. To emphasise our idea’s on the development of art and how now society and people have become idealised and perfected, we decided on the idea of makeup. To incorporate this into our piece, we came up with the idea of applying and wiping away makeup throughout the process of our piece. This which would show the transgression of idealised art from hundreds of years ago to the perfection expected of people and society of the twenty-first century. Our faces will in turn become a canvas which we will repeatedly paint and then remove to reveal the reality of the human form and thereby removing the idealisation of society. Because of this process, we will be left with make-up wipes full of dirty makeup which we leave around the space to emphasise the negativity of some art which masks and conceals the reality of what was painted. Sam then came up with the idea of the makeup wipes being a basis for our costume. We will start the piece all in white and then as the piece progresses and we repeatedly remove makeup, our outfits will become progressively dirtier like that of the wipes. At some points we will even use our costume to remove the makeup from our faces as well as the wipes themselves. The result will hopefully be very striking and highlight our aims and thereby remove the ‘mask’.

IMG_1036End result after makeup is removed.

To end our piece, I thought it would be quite poignant to move into the opposing room which holds the model of the dead body. As a group, we all agree that despite being modern and quite shocking, it is in fact a more accurate representation of life as the actor has not tried to hide reality or idealise death. It is honest and raw and so we feel it would be appropriate at this time to remove our makeup for the last time. Often, modern art is criticized as nowadays anything displayed in the right way can be interpreted as ‘art’. It has changed drastically from the traditional paintings which the usher gallery displays and is often misunderstood. Will our performance shed a more positive light on a new age of art?

 

(2012) ‘Psychophantic Relations With Art: Analytic Romanticism and the Problem of Perversion’ Contemporary Psychoanalytic Studies. 15, p175-208

Feeling Lost…

Shellie-Ann Barrowcliffe / / Development, Experimentation, People

At this current moment in time I feel as though we have a lot of great ideas but are not really making any progress. I understand that the whole process of creating a site specific performance is in my opinion not an easy thing to do or get your head around. ‘Site Specific work has to deal with, embrace and
cohabit with existing factors…’ ((Persighetti. 2000. p,12)) and it is at this moment of our process where we have these ideas but putting them into practice seems difficult and just isn’t seeming possible. I am not sure if it is our location with it also being a business so we can’t interrupt there working day or if we are just not pushing our ideas far enough. I am currently feeling lost about our development and where to go next because so far we haven’t made any definite decisions about our direction and maybe this is our next thing to do.

To make a firm choice as to which direction we are going to go and then experiment and push ideas further. Figuring out where our piece should head will be easier once we have looked at the feedback from the surveys we created as ‘a large part of the work has to do with researching a place’ ((Pavis, P (1998). Dictionary of the Theatre: Terms, Concepts, and
Analysis. London: University of Toronto pp337—8)). We have been doing a lot of research over the time we have been at The Collection, listening to people conversations and figuring out why they are here, looking at how people interact with each other and where people tended to sit. For example if they were on their own then they would often sit in the alcoves.