Considering Our Performance

Lacey Cole / / Cultural Terrorists, Evaluation

We have finally performed our site specific piece, after months of development and discussion. Naturally, there are some elements that we consider less successful, and if we were to perform this piece again, it is likely we would want to be able to alter these elements. I felt our performance fell into two sections essentially, the first half in which we smuggled the Big Ben sculpture into the Usher Gallery and the second half, which seemingly began as soon as we took our balaclavas off. The difference in these two sections in terms of pace gave a much more durational feel to the piece I think, despite the 25 minute run time. This was achieved by slowing down the performance once the instillation had been built. I think this was a very successful way to stage the performance as it gave the audience time to consider our actions of ‘terrorism’ in the first part, compared to the leisurely elements of jazz music and books introduced in the second section.

However, we found a few things that could have been improved. Due to the nature of the site, we were not allowed to eat or drink in our performance area, and thus our original idea of having a quintessentially British tea party once our sculpture had been completed became obsolete. Instead, we reapplied lipstick and read leather bound books. It seems a shame that our tea party idea had to be scrapped, as the variances between the first and second sections could have been much greater and more focused on the differences in class levels traditionally found.  The ladylike nature of our 1920’s costumes could also have been emphasised through this tea party, although after some discussion it was noted that our costumes had a significant impact, especially the dissimilarity between the dainty stockings and lipstick worn with black balaclavas.

It has also been discussed in depth if in fact Big Ben was an appropriate sculptural model to create; given the feminine styling we gave the performance, as it is clearly a phallic object. However, we maintain that our focus was not meant to be on the femininity versus masculinity of the Gallery or its creator, but rather on our own personal history relating to that object. Given that Big Ben is a widely recognised building, we found inspiration in the way Janet Cardiff’s 1999 ‘Missing Voice’ piece ‘seeks to alter viewing conventions more traditionally associated with tourist’ spots (Gorman 2003, p.168). Instead of our audience seeing Big Ben as London, we wanted them to look past that and see their own roots in whichever city or town they feel closest to. The feminist take is of course, another way of looking at our performance, and an interesting one at that, which we would very much like to explore should we have the opportunity to create anything similar to this piece again.

missing voice

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Missing Voice, Audio Tour (1999)

 

References: Gorman, Sarah (2003) ‘Wandering and Wondering: Following Janet Cardiff’s Missing Voice’, Performance Research 8, no.1.

Author: Lacey Cole

“Time for reflection part one…”

Tom Baines / / Concealed Illusions, Evaluation

On the 4th May 2013, at 1pm, ‘The Collection of Concealed Illusions’ was unveiled to the public within the Usher gallery. So now that performance is over it is time for reflection, on how it went and tie up any lose ends and ideas.

 

The performance started with the projection of the ‘Brayford pool and cathedral’ painting, which transformed over the course of a 20 minute loop between this and the digitalised one that I created, which showed the same image only not as aesthetically pleasing. The reason for this was, when the original painting was on the wall in the gallery the small piece of text next to it had said that the painting was ‘idealised’. So as I have said before no swans, no fisherman and no artistic mist. This was the base for our performance. Therefore we intended to reveal to the public, that many paintings are idealised.

 

From this we looked at the modern equivalent of idealisation. ‘Instagram’ a modern iPhone ‘app’ has to ability to add a ‘filter’ to a picture which will leave it blemish free – if you like, a modern idealisation. We then decided to take a picture of the present day Brayford and apply every filter in instagram to it and use them as a link between the video and the rest of the performance, I shall return to this link later. Then of course, the painting of the Brayford was removed and replaced by a local artist’s depiction of the ‘Venus de Milo’ drawn on paper by pencil. At this point we were lost but made this negative into a positive.

 

To our amazement the artist was born around the same time as the painting of the Brayford was done and the ‘Venus de Milo’ drawings were pencil on paper – exactly what I was doing in the performance. To link this in further and without completely scrapping the video and the other instagram images we had printed we decided to instagram a picture of the Venus de Milo and apply every filter and interspersed them amongst the Brayford pictures that would be on the floor.

 

Now to the live aspect of the performance. The girls in the group were applying and removing layers of make up for the duration of our piece – a live representation of idealised paintings.; and of course the similarity between make up application and painting. Here I should return to the link stated earlier. With the video and the photos on the floor it is showing a visual representation of idealised images both modern and past and how idealisation or if you like masking or hiding a ‘true identity’ is still around. I would also seem ridiculous to leave out the fact that this is a gallery. So by having me draw the girls, it is exhibiting the live art similarly to the paintings being exhibited around the gallery.  I am making copies of beauty, just like the local Lincolnshire artist is making copies of the statue of Aphrodite the ancient Greek goddess of love and beauty – the Venus de Milo.

 

Another small theme from our piece is society’s view on idealisation or rather men’s view. I am a male, drawing females. Here there is a sense of men’s view on women when they go out and of course the patriarchal society. But also, with no thought of better word, women exploiting their role to get men to do what they want. In our performance when the girls got up to take off their make-up in front of the projection and the Venus de Milo I turned and watch and continued to draw.

 

A late addition to the piece was the addition of sound which consisted of the girls speaking ‘make-up’ tips which would play on loop throughout and was interspersed with tips on painting. Again this was to reinforce the similarities between the application of paint and make-up.

 

Finally I believe our performance went well and reinforced our key theme of idealisation. Having spoken to some people after about it, it was clear some links they had figured out themselves and once told what the project was about was very clear to them and they understood more.  On reflection I think next time if this piece was to go on or just to develop it further I would like to think about ways in which the performance could reinforce our theme more clearly, however the element of uncertainty made the audience think about the performance more. Next time I would like to experiment the way we could have used the whole Usher gallery and maybe even the grounds.

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.

Recollection.

Gabriel / / Uncategorized

A few days after our piece I have now sat down to recollect about the performance, I went through all my old blog posts as well as the people in my group, and sat down to really think about the progression and final result that was our performance.

 

 

Looking back on our piece I see a lot now that I would like to improve. Though I enjoyed our piece, I felt we strayed away from our painting. We were more focused on showing Café culture, though I felt that was very well done for a site-specific piece, I would like to have seen more of our painting in the performance.

 

 

Though we wore white shirts to match the people in the painting, I felt that was the only thing that happened to be from the actual painting, everything else was more focused on the site. Which is not a bad thing but I would have personally enjoyed to have put more of the painting into our performance.

 

 

Bound by Love

 

 

In our original idea, we had the tree in the outside area serving as the flowers. We also had string tying up the buildings to represent the stitches, and the idea that like the people in the painting the buildings were bound together.

 

 

Due to many complications such as unable to get the okay in time for us to tie up strings, we ended up having to take the string out of completely and tree just didn’t quite fit into our new idea. If I could go back and get the time to practice with the string I would have liked to add it to our piece, to make it part of our exhibition.  I also believe it would have made our piece much bigger. We were quite subtle in our piece and I would have enjoyed the string to catch people’s eyes then bring them in to us actually performing.

 

 

I also would have if I had no expenses and money wasn’t a problem, I would have enjoyed putting myself, Fran and Jennifer in glass boxes, so we mimicked our small exhibitions.

 

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I felt that would have really given the exhibition feel to us, so we melded more with the pieces.  One criticism that Dan said which I agreed with was that our pieces did not fit like a jigsaw, there seemed to be three different parts. With Holly and Shellie upstairs, Us three downstairs and then these art pieces.  I felt any passer by wouldn’t see it all as one performance. I think if we were in glass boxes then we would have look all the same, (with everyone in glass boxes).  Considering Holly and Shellie, were in a glass window, which looked like a glass box, if us three down on the ground were in boxes we would have looked more together.

 

 

I think we improved on our original piece by moving outside, in between the café and the museum, and becoming a melting pot of the two rather than staying inside the café. By moving outside we also had a lot more movement and freedom of the whole space.  Even getting to make our mimic stronger by instead of just being in café with a special board, we got to make our own and enforce what we were trying to do. Which was turning the café culture into an exhibit outside. In our original piece we also had no props or extras being in the café itself but by moving outside we got to add the small exhibits such as the cake stand and the tea. I believe those small props made all the difference. People generally do not like to notice someone acting strange, but they had to come near us to view the props, and that is when they started to notice that we were chatting away to ourselves. I think having the props greatly improved more people noticing the piece.

 

 

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Though I believe our performance was a big success and I did thoroughly enjoy it, I wouldn’t mind going back and improving on it. Looking back on my blog posts you can see how vastly our ideas changed and we ended up doing a completely new performance. Performance wise I wish we would have had some consistency and some reminisce of our original idea in our piece.  Though in the end I really did enjoy our performance and would more than happily do it again, merely for my own enjoyment of seeing people react to the piece.

 

 

Gabriel Davies

 

 

If I Could Have That Time Again…

Shane Humberstone / / Evaluation, Possessed Time

Although I believe we achieved a considerable amount of which we set out to, if we were to do this again there would be several things I would change which I believe would make the overall execution of the performance better and more effective.

The first of these would be to engage with what time meant for other people apart from us. This could have been done by organising a short survey to find what time meant to them and then interpret that through our performance. , potentially by projection, or displaying their comments physically. Another way in which this could have worked is by adding a different dynamic to our piece, sound. If we had either spoken the words, or played recording of them, I believe that we could have had a bigger impact and it also would have made the piece more integrated with Gallery 3. Moreover, to help further see what affect we had on the them, as well as their perception of time, a feedback survey or comment box would have been really interesting and insightful, being beneficial for our findings but also for the Usher gallery as they could use it as an assessment of the space.

Secondly, I think we could have played about more with the projections and should have looked deeper into the idea of projecting something against us. We did talk a lot about this but could not decide on a strong enough image or way to do it. At points the projection was displayed on us, especially during the sleeping segment, which I thought was a really interesting effect. If we were to have a segment where the image was projected across us, I believe this could have been a good to show how time and our experience had affected us and people as a whole.

Although not entirely vital, but as stated previously, to add a new dynamic to the piece, more audience being among us would have been desirable. It would have been interesting to see not only how they reacted and felt being right in the centre of our piece, being part of something they were more than likely not familiar with, but how differently we reacted and how it changed the feel and impact of the piece. We did put up a sign welcoming the public into the space and to enjoy the performance as part of their museum experience, though more could have been done. Maybe introducing the idea to the public on their entrance with leaflets to accompany their visit, making them feel more comfortable with the idea, would have enticed more people to come closer to the action. Also more signage and direction would have been beneficial leading up to the gallery.

The gallery had introduced an ‘iGuide’ too late into our process to utilise it, but we had discussed using different forms of technology to present our piece. If we were to do the piece again using the ‘iGuide’ would have been really interesting, and beneficial, as we could have put a lot of different images of time and clocks on there and more explanation of our perception, and others, on the effect of time. Moreover, audio clips would have been good as it would have added a contrast to normally a very quiet experience, changing it to a more dynamic one.

Authored by Shane Humberstone