Preparing to reveal the unkown

Alicia Visram Cipolletta / / Nova Inventa

One week we showed part of our performance to an audience in our space and received constructive criticism and feedback for us to progress on over the next few weeks.
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The audience questioned our decisions on the cardboard boxes and our choice of using pens to write with, and asked how our choices aided our motives. They were unsure about the black marker pens to write our statements on, and how the choices of phrases were too obvious for the audience. We therefore explored the details of our cardboard boxes to cover up our desired space and came to a decision on the visual elements. By discussing the factors of colour, size and uniformity, we agreed on a monotonous touch of keeping the boxes as they are, brown and shabby. This would hopefully portray to the audience our intention of showing how tedious and dull the routine of life is.

Another aspect they touched on were little but important things such as our background music, the poem we wrote; it was too quietly said and didn’t have the effect it deserves and how we would incorporate the twin space on the other side of The Collection. Whilst crucial to our overall performance, we focused first on our boxes and finding what appropriate ways to show our performances intention, while relating back to our space.

Allan Kaprow states that; ‘there doesn’t need to be a distinction between life and Art, life can be Art’. This to me coincides with our exposure of the space and how we can make our small space a piece of art work in itself. Art and the environment therefore represent the subtleness of everyday life, and our performance will question the monotony of life and how we can connect the concept into our space. Our visual inspiration had come originally from focusing on the spaces that went amiss by an audience or even the general staff that work in The Collection, and how we can see something, but won’t really take note or consideration of it. This is how we felt about our side space that has no artistic statement at all. In our performance, due to the fact that our space is overlooked we instantly felt the need to fill the space and see if anyone would realise. This idea also tied in well with our theory, as in the gallery the art work consists of old boxes with numbers and writing on. This allowed us to challenge the audience into interpreting our boxes as the contemporary art itself or our dramatic statement.

In preparation for our performance we discussed what we would write on our boxes, as this is a crucial element to our performance. We looked at symbolic words or phrases that could possibly sum up our performance. We spent some time in the library progressing on our interest to the monotony of life and how we could integrate the concept into our space; brainstorming words that coincide with the small space and our interest in the art already in the space. Words such as; controlled, suffocated and restricted allow the audience to delve into the confined atmosphere that is our performance whilst following us around the museum, which contrasts completely with the cramped feel of our spaces.

Being an enclosed space we liked the idea of claustrophobia and the light trying to get through the boxes from behind. Due to the long deliberation of interpreting our words into symbols, we then came to a result of roman numerals. We felt that they emphasised the dullness and routine feel of life and the robotic, monotonous mood we were creating.
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On a lighter note, we incorporated the use of 4 balloons to literally show the exposure of not only the space but what we can do in the space. It was also aesthetically pleasing as a contrast to the dull brown boxes. This is important to us as we had chosen an area in the Collection that we felt connected artistically and symbolically to our performance. In order to keep the boxes together and uniformed we decided to use tape and black tape instead of a staple gun to hold the boxes, due to the health and safety and the noise a staple gun would make. The ‘X’ across allowed us to show the rusty, old boxes yet kept a certain consistency to our image.
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Two Islands..

Alicia Visram Cipolletta / / Nova Inventa, Uncategorized

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Whilst playing around with our objects that could possibly reveal our space; egg carton cups and shoe boxes, we only just took notice of the art featured already in the space. Jan Ijas’ ‘Two Islands’ is a film about two enormous waste dumps in New York City – Staten Island and Hart Island – and explores the notion of the contemporary landfill as an archaeological deposit.
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Coincidently this film talks about the boxes used as coffins that people were put in who had no one to claim them. We felt this tied in well with our use of boxes to reveal a space and therefore played around with the idea of writing fragmented words on the boxes. We originally started with the obvious; ‘baby #1’, ‘old man’, ‘the lost’ which did not come through to the audience as we intended, it was too obvious and they felt we were feeding them what we were exploring. We discussed words that tie in the confined spaces we are using and the gloomy tone that the film possesses; ‘controlled’, ‘restricted’ and ‘suffocated’. Whilst we had so many ideas for the one space, its twin on the parallel side of the building needed to be brought into our performance, unfortunately its aesthetics are not as good and we struggled to find inspiration in the space.  For that reason, we focused our attention on the initial space and hoped that as the rehearsals and explorations went on we would come across the purpose for the second space.

At the same time as working on the space we were interested in the idea of incorporating a poem in the background to play with our performance; we looked at the things that people would have missed out from who died in Ijas’ film and created a short poem;

“Life reduced to refuse, Isn’t there more than this? The Lost, forgotten, no names no faces, just a date, time and place. Life reduced to numbers. It started as one, then came more, Too many to count. Nothing but a mass grave. One. Two. Three. Four…”

This poem enabled us to explore into more ideas of things that would fit nicely into our poem;

“Hairbrushes, dollies, brand new frocks. Dentist visits, tears, knee high socks. Late night dinner, eavesdropping, being a great fried. Doing what you love, midnight calls, knowing what’s around the bend.”

This part of the poem was inspired from our ideas of, similarly to our space, things that are overlooked and forgotten about in a person’s life. Important things that we take for granted when we grow up. We decided it would definitely be used, and we possibly liked the idea of Tequila standing behind the boxes, reading the poem and being the object of revelation.

Has Museum Theatre Emulsified the Two?

Shane Humberstone / / Inspiration, Possessed Time, Research

During most museum visits you meander through the exhibits occasionally reading a thing or two and possibly even have a chat about what you have seen however this is changing. Catherine Hughes believes that ‘museums are theatres, rich with stories of human spirit and activity and the natural forces of life… both museums and theatre present us with ourselves in different contexts, holding the mirror up and showing us what we have done and what we might do (Hughes 1998, P. 10).

Performances in museums by actors are becoming increasingly popular, with our piece Possessed Time being an example of this. The parallels have always existed between museums and theatre, the whole idea that an audience goes to see something that they will hopefully find engaging, but now the two have become to merge and the distinctions between the two may be obvious although at a small number.

Susan Bennett observes, ‘… theatres and museums have increasingly become symbolic and actual neighbours, sharing the task of providing entertaining and educational experiences that draw people to a district, a city, a region, and even a nation’(2013 p. 3). They both serve a similar purpose and both work together to create a culture that is symbolic of the area in which they are situated. Moreover, ‘exhibitions are fundamentally theatrical, for they are how museums perform the knowledge they create’ (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998, p. 3). The parallels are clear, they both serve the same purpose they just have always done it in different ways, and now that live action is happening in museums theatre has bled a new dynamic into them. When performing Possessed Time people stared and looked at us and try to understand what we were saying and what our purpose was as if we were a painting or a sculpture.

As well as differences between the two buildings, such as the audience in a theatre being on one side as they sit and watch the actors on the other, there are also differences between theatre on the stage and a performance in a museum. In a theatre ‘the subject matter of the play bears no relationship to the premises in which the play is performed’, whereas in a museum, ‘the subject matter is related to the museum as a whole or the exhibit’ (Bridal 2004, p. 9). If we performed our piece in a theatre, it would have had half the impact compared to Gallery 3 because all our influences and process were based on the things we discovered in that space. Furthermore, ‘museums traffic mostly in material designated as representing the past, while theatrical performance takes place resolutely in the present, ephemeral, resistant to collection’ (Bennett 2013, p. 5).

I believe that although they will forever be separate entities now that theatre has started to become part of the museum experience, the two will become ever more indistinguishable.

 

Written by Shane Humberstone.

Works Cited
Bennett, Susan (2013) Theatre and Museums, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Bridal, Tessa (2004) Exploring Museum Theatre Oxford: AltaMira.
Hughes, Catherine (1998) Museum Theatre: Communicating with Visitors Through Drama, Portsmouth: Heinemann.
Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara (1998) Destination Culture, London and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

 

Relatable Sources

Chloe Doherty / / Inspiration, Possessed Time, Research, Video Research

“All rooted in an interest to make work that brings together theatre and the visual arts in a single unified vision” (Station House Opera, 2013).

Station House Opera are a site specific orientated theatre company based in the United Kingdom. When looking over their archived work, the thing which I found the most intriguing was their extensive use of multi-media, as it was something which we experimented within our piece. The pieces of work which I found particularly fascinating when comparing them to ours were that of their Ultramundane, Snakes and Ladders and Backwards.

ultramundane-01-c Ultramudane (1983).

Ultramundane’s intention was to present the public with an “inversion of the world” (Station House Opera, 1983) which they know so well. They intended for their performers to be “physically together yet dramatically separate, for they belonged to different parts of the landscape” (1983). This is something which we experimented with within our site specific performance. Although we were all close in proximity, we were apart in terms of aesthetical ease. The costumes we used represented a specific part of the day, so each ‘character’ would make sense at one point during the day, whilst the remaining five would continue to look out of place until they had found their specific ‘setting’. This parallels Station House Opera’s idea of characters belonging to different parts of the landscape.

snakes-and-ladders-01-bob-c Snakes and Ladders (1998).

Their use of multimedia appears to be most present in their 1998 production Snakes and Ladders. Snakes and Ladders “traced the external signs of an invisible dialogue between mind and matter” (Station House Opera, 1998). The performers on stage were accompanied by doubles of themselves presented in a video projection format. This is similar to the fact that we used ourselves to create our human clock projection, as we are essentially removing the ‘characters’ from world, into another. By mixing the virtual world with the actual you see two different interpretations of a person. In the recreated image you see a person who can not experience emotion or danger, but in the actual world you see the aftermath, the effects on the performers.

snakes-and-ladders-01-bob-c Backwards (2010).

One of their more recent works Backwards (2010) explores the notion of time, with a particularly strong focus on the notion of the distorted. “Do we believe in progress? Do we have evidence that humans improve? Evolution may operate in time, but our sensibilities do not. We must no longer see the world as one damn thing after another” (Station House Opera, 2010). We explored a similar issue within our performance, hoping that watching us would cause the audience to ask themselves similar questions to those seen above. Backwards starts at the end of a day and reverses back to the start whereas in our piece, we start at the beginning of a day but speed it up, condensing it into 6 hours opposed to 24.

Another piece of work which I found to be inspiring is Christian Marclay’s The Clock. “A 24-hour montage of thousands of film and television clips with glimpses of clocks, watches, and snatches of people saying what time it is” (Bradshaw, 2011). The interesting thing about this installation is that whenever the time is shown on screen, it is in fact accurate.

“When I first arrived, I found myself giving a little amused laugh at each appearance of the time. Then the novelty wore off and I became silent” (Bradshaw, 2011). A similar process happened with our installation piece, at first it may have seemed vaguely amusing as the audience had not yet grasped the concept of what we were creating. But, after a short time in the space, much like what Bradshaw has stated, you become mesmerised by the notion and do indeed fall to silence. Throughout Marclay’s The Clock, the image of a clock was not always blindingly present all of the time, sometimes it appeared as a background shot or even an afterthought. This is comparable to the use of the human clock and decomposing pineapple in our performance. Although it is the visuals that draw you in initially, they become a part of the background as the action develops. Another interesting point which Bradshaw makes is that the longer he spent in the space the more fictional the clock became, “I stopped noticing that they were telling me exactly what the time actually was” (2011). Having spoken to audience members about our piece post-production, our use of the concept of time appeared to have a very similar effect. Once you accept that you are embarking on a journey with the actors, much as they do, you lose your grasp on both time and reality.

Author: Chloe Doherty

Work Cited:
– Station House Opera (2012) Station House Opera (online) Available at: http://www.stationhouseopera.com/ (Accessed on 12 May 2013).
– Bradshaw, P (2011) Christian Marclay’s The Clock: a masterpiece of our times (online) Available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2011/apr/07/christian-marclay-the-clock (Accessed 12 May 2013).

The Legacy of Usher and the Notion of Time

James Barker / / Possessed Time

James Ward Usher was a man who gave a lot to Lincoln, he provided employment with his jewellers firm, he helped establish the strong links between Lincoln and the Imp which drew many tourists there at the time, he was the first man in Lincoln to use electricity and most relevant to the purposes of this blog, upon his death he bequeathed the entirety of his considerable art collection to the city of Lincoln and set aside £60,000 for the construction of a gallery to house it in. It is in this gallery we will be holding our performance, a durational piece which explores the nature of time and the working day, inspired by the fact that a large part of the Usher collection is a variety of clocks. they are in many cases wonderful works of art themselves and are a dominating presence throughout the gallery. I personally feel that a durational piece is the greatest way to honour Ushers legacy through the means of performance as much like the man himself, we will be giving something to the people of Lincoln, or at least those people of Lincoln who will be attending an art gallery on a Saturday! At the risk of sounding incredibly pretentious, the piece will be the art that we bequeath to those people, our gift to Lincoln

The focus of the piece is doubly appropriate firstly for the obvious reason that Usher was a watchmaker and a piece on time and the working day can be seen as an allegory or metaphor of his adult life. The second is that as a Victorian businessman, he was part of a generation of men who did much to lay the foundations of what is now considered a normal working day. Prior to the industrial revolution, a large proportion of the populations work could be described as agrarian, with their working hours dictated by season and available daylight rather than working to a regulated schedule. For them, time was harder to define, it was mainly something measured through natural occurrences. As the majority of the population switched to industrial labour, they went from an environment where time was an intangible presence to one where it was not only easily visible in the form of factory clocks, but where through a series of shift patterns it actively controlled their lives, something which to this day has never truly been changed. Through our performance we will aim to give a stylised version of this, whereby through repetitive actions we explore the tedious, overly regulated actions of a day in the manual labour profession, emphasising the constant dictation of the days events through the constant sounds of a ticking clock being played whilst the piece is being performed. This constant reminder that whatever we do can be quantified in measurements of seconds, minutes, hours etc once again shows how we are constant slaves to a system of our own making. The fact that we have created our own jailer is represented in the fact that during the section of the piece where we represent going to work, we will be constructing a clock. Prior to the performance, we will have created a clock of a different nature which will be projected onto the wall for the performances duration. It shall be a twenty four hour digital clock composing of our own bodies, on one level it will be a constantly changing visual stimulant for audience members in a piece that at times will be undoubtedly slow moving if not downright static, on another deeper one it is symbolic of how we make time ourselves and a clear representation of how it is in many ways a human construct when we attempt to make a measure of it. In this case it is literally time being recorded by people. As the clock slowly counts down to zero, we are shown to be timing ourselves, showing the the self imposed restrictions of our time measurement system but also the way that those systems are as dependent on us as we are on them. On a more aesthetic and less (at least intentionally) philosophical level, this is a direct contrast to the clocks one would usually observe, normally functional items even the grandiose and beautiful ones to be observed in the gallery naturally have a very mechanical style. Through constructing a clock out of possibly the most organic materials possible (the human body), we juxtapose the traditional timepieces, of which there is one in the room next to where the projection will be displayed, with this anthropomorphised clock being beautiful in its own way and just as functional, yet will challenge the perceptions of what is a machine that records time. Is the projection even a clock, as it is a collection of images which project in a pre-selected order as opposed to a machine that will once set up autonomously continue to give an accurate display of time, but on the other hand, if it depicts time accurately at a given moment then there is a strong argument for considering it as a timepiece. Ultimately, until the performance, not all of these questions will be able to be answered but there is a certain level of intrigue as to how it will be interpreted by members of the public and what impact it will have on both their visit to the gallery that day and their general perceptions of time, what it is, how we measure it and how we use it to restrict ourselves and regulate our days and lives.

 

Edit. I wrote this blog over a month ago, hence the nature of it’s contents and the ideas I express and only realised today I had written it but never posted it