The World is our stage

Jessica Jarvis / / Concealed Illusions

Discussion in previous weeks has been based on ‘Common Themes’ within our class,  helped me understand the links between all of our performances, the most frequent words that were used were time,past and present and people.  Many of us are using members of the public as the performers watching and analyzing what they are doing, making them the performers and us the audience.

Particularly in our site specific performance, we have chosen the painting of Lincoln, painted by John Carmichael (1858) which is located in the Usher gallery  We have been questioning what makes this painting special? What is the main focus? What do people draw upon? What is their interpretation of the painting? Would it be interpreted differently if it was to be displayed somewhere else?

All these questions were yet to be answered, however with the on going research and experimenting with people and their responses some of these questions have yet to be answered.  By asking questions to the members of the public, recording and taking pictures of what we see.

Both The Usher gallery and The collection have a different atmosphere, The Collection being nosier and interactive where as The Usher gallery being a much more quieter and a calmer place, both of which attract members of the public.  We originally wanted our piece to be located in both parts of the museum connecting the two buildings together but due to the development of our piece which is focusing on a certain area of the usher gallery (the drawings) we have discussed that it would not make sense and there wouldn’t be a valid reasoning behind it.

We have decided to focus on the drawings because our theme is masking. The drawing area helps create the illusion of copies, which encourages us to create a meaningful performance reflecting upon women being copies of beauty. How most women highlight key face features to impress and look beautiful making them a copy of themselves.

The painting of the Brayford by John Carmichael (1858) was moved and replaced with a Venus de Milo drawing which was a spanner in the works for us! But with a little bit of research it turns out that the new exhibition represents beauty, love, affection  This significant link between the two paintings has emphasized the meaning behind the two paintings. How the old reflects idealism and the new drawing also reflects beauty, which highlights and signifies our underline meaning of our performance message.

A new idea which we have explored today was the use of make-up techniques instructions being over played on a sound system whilst we are performing again the repetition of the day to day process which most women go through to look good. Make-up technique instructions are usually  found in feminine magazines or on the internet and even social media websites now, we have used different types of make-up instructions also incorporating painting instructions to show the similarity between masking a painting and masking a face making both products an image or an exhibition, which could reflect ‘the world is our stage’ becoming something that your not.

 

Concealed

Jessica Jarvis / / Concealed Illusions

An Identity is the set of meanings that define who one is when one is an occupant of a particular role in society, a member of a particular group, or claims particular characteristics that identify him or her as a unique person 

Burke, Peter J and Stets, Jan E (2009) Identity Theory: Oxford

Through Make-up, clothing, hair style and any other form of identity this can be seen as masking our individuality  making ourselves look a better ‘version’ of ourselves. This is seen through social media, magazine, television, making it our image look better as part of our day to day routine.

Questions that we ask ourselves are- Who is it for? What it is for? Is there a particular reasoning or is it just normality? Something that because the ‘normality’.

‘ If beauty implies the power of capturing men’s affections even for women who are deficient in understanding and reason, ugliness can be perceived to have the reverse effect’   Hecher, Dagmar (2007) The narrative construction of the female body in the British novel of the 19th century: Germany

Nowadays wearing make-up is part of a daily routine for many woman. Does a woman put make-up to make them feel better about them selves or do they put it on to impress a particular person? Beauty is a theme that anyone can interpret-ate  allowing the individual to create their own opinion on beauty whether that is natural or fake.

Through our performance we are using make-up showing the amount of make-up we put on, especially for a night-out or an occasion, it can create an un-naturalistic image of ourselves.  We will show this by the repetition of putting make-up on, highlighting the impact of a on-going routine that most women face. Our rehearsal process has been quite painful, as the impact of make-up being put on and off can be a painful experience due to the chemicals that are within the products.

Using make-up removal wipes heightens the effect of reality, which could be seen as the ‘ugly truth’.  Not stating that women are ugly without make-up, absolutely not,  I am just emphasizing the fact, the effort and time that goes into concealing ourselves, which of course will be reflected in our piece.

Referring back to the ‘ugly truth’ when seeing something so neat and the make-up being a sense of perfection to seeing the make-up removed and on the wipe, this reflects a dishonest reality. Seeing the ugliness of make-up making it look dirty and grubby, creating a no filter image.

We have discussed and explored labeling ourselves after each encounter with the make-up, for instance when the make up is applied we would label it ‘fake’ or ‘illusion’ the same for when the when make up is removed using text such as ‘honesty’ or ‘natural’. This process would be on-going giving the overall outcome of the three of us covered in labels, reflecting on society labeling the type of people/fashion in our modern day world.  The question we ask to ourselves, is the labeling necessary  Do we need to make it so obvious?  This is something that we are going to discuss and explore further, perhaps with projection or sounds.

The message and affect we hope to create.

Fotini Efstathiou / / Cultural Terrorists

As we have previously stated the reasoning behind our performance is to smuggle the culture and cosmopolitan nature of London in the shape of the Big Ben into Lincoln. The reason we have chosen the Big Ben is due to it’s recognisable image and an instant association with London. The clock has become a symbol of London, particularly in the visual media and this factor also incorporates our use of newspaper as it emphasises the importance of the media in such a cosmopolitan city. Another reason we have chosen the Big Ben is that it is also a clock tower and so incorporates the history of The Usher Gallery itself as James Usher was a clock maker and if you walk around the gallery there is an abundance of clocks dotted around. The Big Ben sculpture we have created is of a vast scale and the reason we have made such a large object is because we want to make a big statement, if the sculpture was small we would not capture the attention of the audience as much or make such an impact. We want people in the gallery to stop and take interest in our performance even if they were not there intentionally wanting to watch but get enticed in.

Another factor that will entice the passers by is our use of soundscape. We have asked a fellow member of our class to begin the track ten mintues before our intended arrival and we have decided this so that the impact we are intending to create has a chance to build, hopefully the audience will begin to wonder why the soundscape is playing and it’s significance. We have decided on the idea of arriving in a speeding get away car to emphasise the idea of smuggling and cultural terrorism, this as well will hopefully entice passers by to come into the gallery to see what is going on. The soundscape is busy London traffic followed by the chimes of The Big Ben…it then begins playing music from the 1920’s and this brings us to the second part of our performance.

Susan Bennet states in her book ‘Theatre and Museums’ that ‘the use of live performance by museums to provide an encounter with a past that is brought to life'(Bennett p7, 2013). and in a sense this is what is created in the second part of our performance as the balaclavas are removed. It is evident that we are women from the 1920’s due to our costume which is quite authentic with a flapper style, stockings and pearls. Our posture and style of movement will change to capture the elegant woman of the 20’s whilst reading our leather bound books and observing the art of the gallery as the 1920’s Jazz fills the room. In a way we are capturing the history of The Usher Gallery as that was built in the 1920’s and so we are reacting a typical scene expected from women from the era. This calm, elegant demeanour will continue until we leave the gallery to capture the history of The Usher Gallery but to also emphasise the contrast between the two parts of our performance.

Works Cited:

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

Author: Fotini Efstathiou

The ball is rolling…

Daniela Scimeca / / Development, Nova Inventa

Now it was improvement time!

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Firstly we wanted to discuss the boxes we were using, as some of them seemed flimsy the last time we were experimenting with them. To resolve this we sourced better quality cardboard boxes. This benefited us as we could now write on the boxes without them topping over when the wall was built. We also wanted to work on the uniformity of the boxes as visually it didn’t seem to look right. We thought about covering them in paper but after much deliberation this seemed to take away from the effect and the bareness we initially liked about them. We finally decided on a compromise, that being that we would but black tape over the boxes in the style of a cross. Not only did this visually look good but it also meant when we would write on the boxes they were divided into small sections. I really liked it as it was beginning to look like a piece of artwork now.

On reflection of what our feedback audience had said about writing on the boxes with markers and that it was too noisy we decided to bring in other materials to experiment with. Firstly we tried chalks, however we felt it wasn’t vibrant enough and wasn’t particularly eye catching.

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When then tried with paints, we really liked the effect it gave, especially the red paint, for us there was something about the paint brush strokes that just seemed so effective, it was artistic, it was contemporary. We stuck with it.

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The positioning of boxes was important to the aesthetics of our piece. Initially we wanted the wall created to be completely filled, similar to that of a brick wall. It wasn’t until we were having a run through and started playing around with the boxes that we discovered the effect of taking away particular boxes had on the space. It started to reveal pockets of light, some big gaps, some small, and the fact the sun was beaming through the window, made for some excellent effects, creating shadows and areas of light and dark. We really liked this and decided this is how we would like to build the wall.

 

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As mentioned before we were very interested in the parallel window space in the opposing gallery and we felt we could marry the two together in some way. Walking back and forth from either window space we realised they were quite far apart. But this didn’t necessarily mean we thought it would hinder our ideas. We decided to trial out the idea of having one area where we would have the boxes stored, we could build the wall and paint them and then walk them over to the other space and leave the boxes there. It was important to us to think about the walk to and from each window. To begin with we walked very fast paced however we felt this didn’t correspond well with the idea of the monotony of life we then practiced a rhythm to walk to so we would all look the same. There was three entrances to the other gallery so when leaving the first area we decided to each take a different entrance into the gallery, this was effective as it felt we were invading the space from different angles. We then randomly placed our boxes in the alcove to signify the deconstruction of the wall.

Taking on board what our feedback audience said about the writing on the boxes being too obvious we decided we would write roman numerals on them. This arose from our original ideas about the four seasons and the concept of time. Time is a constant the clock will always be ticking. Similarly the seasons will always stay the same. We felt roman numerals would tie this in well. Also it was acknowledging the roman city that was once there.

Another problem was it was too much having music and a voice over, to compensate for this we instead recorded the dialogue which we would have on a loop.

Finally after the wall is constructed and we’ve taken it down, and moved all the boxes to the other space we want to come back to where we initially started and be left with one box in the alcove to which we open and release four balloons.

Word Count: 723

Audience Feedback

Daniela Scimeca / / Evaluation, Nova Inventa, Public Responses

18/3/13

Today we performed our ideas to our peers in order to get some constructive feedback. The audience picked up on a few things that didn’t necessarily correspond so well these were as follows.

  • The black markers were far too squeaky when we went to write on the boxes, they felt it distracted from everything else going on.
  • We had decided to incorporate some quite solemn music in the background but when this was being played whilst we were performing the audience suggested this was too loud. In reflection we agreed and felt it should be quieter. We also felt the subtlety would be more effective as our overall statement suggests we want to evoke emotion which we feel the music contributes to this.
  • We decided that we wanted Tequila who was reading out the poem to be inside the alcove as the wall was being built but as the positioning of the audience was behind her, her voice was being lost in the window area and wasn’t being projected out.  The audience was right and we’re pleased they picked up on this so we could amend her positioning.
  • The comments we were writing on the boxes such as #baby no.1 and why is this happening, someone pointed out these seemed too obvious. On reflection I understood what they meant and agreed the messages didn’t provoke any real thought to the audience. We were giving them the answers on a plate and that certainly wasn’t our intention.
  • There were some comments about whether a link between the video loop being played and our performance was needed. Our argument was it was in the space and we were acknowledging that. One concern we had was the volume that this installation was projected at, this was something we would have to ask The Collection about and whether we could turn it down.
  • At the end of the piece we decided to knock down the wall, this was to signify the destruction of space. However after we did this as a group even we felt it didn’t really work, again it was too obvious and our aim wasn’t to make clear obvious points to the audience. Much like a piece of art could have a thousand and one interpretations we wanted our performance to do the same. This is also where we realised we could incorporate the other window alcove space and perhaps the boxes could go there after.

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It confirmed some positive responses!

  • Everyone seemed to like the minimalist approach to our piece.
  • The audience liked the words being said aloud, they felt the added dimension was a nice touch and that it was nice to have something to listen to.
  • The building of the wall they thought was a good concept and that it was effective in the space.

We were using our knowledge of the architecture and art around us and responding to the space. A statement that Clifford McLucas makes I feel elaborates on this point, ‘The real power of site-specific work is that it somehow activates, or engages with, the narratives of the site in some kind of way. That might be with its formal architecture, or it might be with the character of the building. It might be to do with the history of the building. (1995, p.47) After our feedback the discussion proved helpful, we do have a few points to adjust and rectify but none the less we are pleased with the progression we have made from this week!

Word count: 584

Works cited:

McLucas, C. and Pearson, M. (1995) Performance/ Place/Public (Brith Gof Archive, NLW), company document.