Jennie Chapman – The Collection Of…

Evaluation of Final Performance

Jennie Chapman / May 6, 2013May 11, 2013 / Evaluation, People

After finally performing our piece the other day, I have mixed feelings as to whether it was a success. On the whole I think it went well and enjoyed being a part of the group and my part in the performance. However, if we were to do it again, I think improvements could be made.

Considering the amount of changes and alterations we have gone through for our performance, what we eventually came to was simple yet what we wanted to achieve in the beginning; turning the cafe into an exhibition. Along with our static exhibits, the cake stand and the tea set, we successfully ‘performed’ as a Collection of People. Myself, Fran and Gabriel reciting quotes and conversations we have listened to which has been a great element to our performance from the weeks of research and experimentation of this module and Holly and Shellie performing their mimic of the cafe demonstrating the activity we have also observed in the cafe.

For me, this performance has been the strangest one yet in terms of how and where it was performed. The cafe already being open and the museum itself, we were waiting around to begin our performance. Although we said that we would start at midday, it did not feel like the start of a performance unlike it would if we were doing it in a studio or on stage but then again this is to be expected. One reason why I think this was was because we did not have a standing audience, our audience were the people who happened to be around or in the cafe at that time, which is what we wanted and achieved. I found that the people who did see us were hesitant to engage with what was happening particularly with myself, Fran and Gabriel, proof of this came when a couple asked us to stop! However, some spectators did engage by waving up at Holly and Shellie and I heard others ask each other what it was about which in a way is a compliment as it shows that people were trying to understand our performance.

“It is tangible, uncomplicated, unitary: all that legitimizes and validates acts of theatre. It may as a result be barely accounted for and under-represented within the purview of historiography” (Pearson, 2010, p192).

This quote from Pearson is speaking of the after math of a site specific performance. He says that performances go unnoticed and undocumented; they do not cause a huge stir among the public. This I can understand, however, I feel that this is because site specific performance is unique and has no boundaries. To have been apart of a learning experience like this, I have been able to experiment and undertake new practices, which is what site specific performance is about according to Pearson. It is not to prove a thesis it is to “encourage further initiatives in performance” (Pearson, 2010,p2).

Our work at The Collection may have only been small and experimental and I would like to expand on it, but it has been something different and intriguing to me as it has given me a greater knowledge and understanding of contemporary performance. The development and process of this piece has been challenging and complicated at times, however, I am happy with how it has turned out overall. If I were to do our performance again, I think I would like to take our performance further by making it more of a durational piece of work and also emphasise the idea of the cafe being in itself an exhibition as a I think we could have made our idea much stronger than it was. As well as this, I would hope to improve areas of the process in order to further inspire, communicate and encourage spectators to see this site from a new perspective.

Works Cited:

Pearson, Mike(2010) Site- Specific Performance, Palgrave Macmillan.

Final Changes

Jennie Chapman / April 22, 2013May 11, 2013 / Development, Experimentation, People

After much discussion and plenty of thinking, our group has decided to move out of the cafe and into the courtyard space. We have done this whilst thinking of our audience and the feedback we received. We felt that we could leave the cafe so we were not limiting ourselves to audience restrictions and partly because we did not want to inconvenience anyone! But also the space is larger and it enables us to use the framed alcove seating which is something we have liked from the beginning.

From the feedback we realised that we had lost the idea of making the cafe a exhibition; our original idea. After much more experimentation and some more feedback, the key was to keep it simple. Along with this relocation, we decided that the painting ‘Bound by Love’ was no longer relevant to our piece as it did not fit in with the concept of making the cafe an exhibition.

“Exhibition involves imposition of order on objects, brought into a particular space and a specific set of relations with one another” (Rugg and Sedgwick, 2007, p 29).

We had many ideas of the different ‘exhibits’ we could have outside including the conversations/quotes written down the stairs and a collage of photos of the cafe on the wall, however after thought and experiments these did not work. This left us with our two static exhibits of a cake stand and a tea set.

We maintained our part in the performance but altered Fran’s part. The first idea was to have Fran on a platform re-enacting a person in the cafe siting at a table drinking tea and eating something however with our mimic in the Education windows was still in place we decided that it was not needed. It then came that Fran would take on the character of a worker in the cafe, as this was another type of person we had observed whilst doing our earlier experiments, and be the third part to our exhibits of people including myself and Gabriel.

A new idea that came to light was the need for explanation of our exhibition. How are we to do this? We are going to take the idea of the ‘Specials’ board in the cafe and give a brief explanation for each part of our performance. This will hopefully help others to understand the concept behind our performance and encourage our audience to see new perspectives.

Works Cited:

Rugg, Judith and Michele Sedgwick(2007) Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance, Bristol: Intellect Books.

Working Progress

Jennie Chapman / March 18, 2013May 11, 2013 / 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.

Rehearsal Schedule for Cafe :)

Shellie-Ann Barrowcliffe / March 4, 2013April 20, 2013 / People

25.2 – Experiment socially to see what causes reactions and grabs people attention.
Collect sources ready to experiment the stringing up outside ready for Monday 4^th March.
Continue research on Café culture, narrowing it down to the café at the collection.

4.3 – Experiment with the ideas that we have for outside, if it is not possible to do this at the height that we wish to then do it at a lower levelso we can still experiment and plan.
Have a survey formed to hand out to member of the café to see the reasons behind why people visit the café.

11.3 – WORK IN PROGRESS WEEK! Need to have something that we want to try to see if it works ready to show the other groups so that they can give us feedback.
Also continue research to create a verbatim script as part of the performance in the café.

18.3 – Make sure all materials are gathered, script is close to being completed.
Have some idea of movement that is going to be done. Need to have a clear structure for the piece

Easter- Arrange a date to meet up during the 2^nd week of the holiday.
Continue development and experimentation with materials.

8.4 – Attempt to have some sort of initial run through, see what problems arise. Then work out solutions of these problems.

15.4- Further discussion of the run through that we previously had. Make the piece strong and clear. Make it have a definite purpose of direction.

Things we need to consider:

Costumes
Music
Flowers
Materials
Risk assessment
What is happening in the upstairs window?
Making the café into an exhibition?
Is our script going to be completely verbatim?

Development/ Experiments

Jennie Chapman / March 4, 2013May 11, 2013 / Development, Experimentation, People

Today we looked at trying some of our performance ideas out on site. From last week’s session we had some elements we needed to figure out for us to recreate the painting ‘Bound by Love’.

We decided to focus on the string as it was the key element of us wanting to join the cafe with the rest of the museum and so neglected our initial idea of recreating the painting as a whole. We were able to experiment with the string to see what it would look like. We also decided to use a coloured ribbon in the midst of the string as this would be seen, clearly linking the two sides of the building together. This became even more relevant when we decided to experiment with part of our performance taking place in the Education suite.

We came up with was to use the windows in the Education Suite and to see whether anyone in the café would notice. Holly and Shellie volunteered to carry out the experiment. First of all they simply improvised which included dancing and talking out of the window. We then began suggesting other movements that they could do such as have an argument, pretend to be in a café, climb the windows. Quite a number of the public looked up at the windows and pointed it out to the people they were with as well as people in the café noticing, people walking past the building started to wave at the windows. Through this experiment came the idea of mimicking and emphasizing the cafe by Holly and Shellie taking the characters of those we had seen in the cafe but contrasting it with child’s play. This was very effective as it would emphasize activity in the cafe and also the people we had observed.

We also continued to carry out some experiments in the café which involved us sitting alone at a table and start talking to as if we were with someone else. We did this in order to see if people would respond or notice us. At first when Holly and Shellie tried, nobody really took notice however when Gabriel had spoke as if having an argument with someone, a few people looked up and reacted. We have been recording parts of people’s conversation in order to use it somehow in our performance. We are thinking of combining these two elements together; sitting alone whilst repeating quotes and conversations we have overheard as we have found it intriguing to hear the types of conversation people have in the cafe as well as the type of people we have seen.

This developed further when each of us performing in the cafe took on a ‘character’ of a person we had observed in the cafe, each one of us becoming an exhibit in the cafe. Such ‘characters’ as The Reader, The Working Man and The Family. We are going to sit individually around the cafe and re-enact the conversations and actions of these people. Along with this we will create placards similar to those seen by real exhibits throughout The Collection in order to further our idea of making the cafe an exhibition. The placards will have quotes on them and also the names of our exhibits like the ones in the images below.