When I first watched this installation I wasn't sure what exactly it was about but I don't think this is necessarily a problem because I don't think you should immediately be aware of what a piece of art is trying to tell you. What really stuck out to me was the use of tights as masks. It read as very suffocating to me and I think it said something to me about the suffocation of identity labels. Obviously with the audio coming into play it became obvious that the piece was about gender inequality but I guess in a way what I mentioned before about identity is true of this piece also. What is interesting about this piece is how the masks could make the gender of the two actors indistinguishable which pushes the idea of blurring gender lines and therefore ridding society of gender inequality.
Kim
I think one thing that really makes this piece effective is the use of a singular performer. It is so captivating to watch the small details on someone's face change and it can be far more interesting than watching an elaborate, choreographed piece. I think the rawness of the facial expressions and the interaction with the audience will be really moving for the audience. I am interested to see how all the paint will look at the end.
Tia and Esme
This piece is not only mesmerising but quite moving. The form of the piece is so strong the only way I could think of the piece being improved is the pushing of the investigation between the two girls a bit more. From hearing the piece being described by Tia and Esme, I've heard the piece is about two girls investigating each others bodies but I think the objective of investigation could be pushed a tiny bit more to make the audience feel like voyeurs and just enhance the intrusion that the audience feel.
I think the main question that we are posing with our piece is: What makes a person the person they are?
There is a scientific and very human debate surrounding this question and two main factors are cited: nature and nurture.
I watched the video below to understand about the dichotomy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ksP34GYwbY
He somewhat jokingly references how people expect there to be a gene for everything including depression, divorce and weight gain. I think what he is playing on and alluding to is the fact that people are too quick to attribute something to either genetics or nurture factors without appreciating the crossover that nature and nurture can have in order to make a person. He says himself that people think something is either "environmental or DNA, it is either nature or nurture". I strongly agree, I do not think most things are solely nature or nurture it is the combination of both. Saying this I believe that some things like sexuality are predetermined and environmental factors can do little to change them - at least in the way that we consider change.
For example the gender or genders someone is attracted to probably is pre-determined and doesn't change but I think the look/appearance of the people you are attracted to is strongly influenced by social factors. So nature and nurture are intermingling.
This also makes me think of a debate we had once in Religious Studies about whether talent existed genetically or whether there was no such thing as talent you are born with but only hard work which creates talent. My teacher brought up the fact that Mozart could play extremely complicated compositions on the piano at the age of 6, which some adult pianists could not play, to prove that some form of genetic talent must exist. However, what she neglected to mention was that Mozart's dad was also a pianist and trained him everyday since he was a very young child. Would he have been able to play such complicated compositions at such a young age without his father's training? Would every six year old be able to play such complicated compositions even with training?
Another thing which Steve Jones said which resonated with me is how 'people often think of nature and nurture being both part of a cake and if you slice it you can get either nature or nurture' but to get the ingredients of nature and nurture back 'you would have to unbake the cake'. I think this statement resonates with me because although there are a lot of people who think that a person's nature is unchangeable, I also think this can be true of nurture. I think that things that happen to you especially in those early, formative years can often be irreversible and there is only so much that therapy can do especially if as an adult you are trying to heal mental scarring that occurred when you were a child. I just think of all the people that carry experiences positive and negative that occurred during childhood right to the deathbed. So maybe it's not just nature that has an indelible, irremovable mark on who you are as a person but it's also nurture. Perhaps Shakespeare should have also said:
"With thou foul nurture in tow, nature you will never return to."
******
Before rehearsing this performance I never thought about things like the 9/11 bombings as being an issue of nature vs. nurture. I think I always assumed they must be an issue of nurture. I've never thought, perhaps out of optimism and perhaps out of ignorance, that the will to commit those crimes could have come from natural sources. But now I guess that, that must play a part in some capacity. Given human variation in almost every aspect it makes sense that if parts of your body responsible for your emotions, like the hippocampus, are smaller or release less neurones, you might be more predisposed to have the will to do that. But even saying that feels slightly wrong because it feels assumptive and leaves everything to science.
I think what this performance has also made me think about is a film called Boy A which is about a boy who committed a murder with another boy when he was a child and how this has affected his adult life. It's a very moving film and I love how sympathetically he was presented and played. One of the boys had been a victim of abuse as a child and you could tell how much that had affected him and how that was a raw wound in his life. It makes you ask all these questions about how that issue affects violent behaviour and it's quite uncomfortable for me to talk about but ultimately I think although a person isn't their experiences they can't be separated from their experiences. I think as humans we should strive to be better than we think we can be, even if we fail. I think that's the only way to live.
*******
Evaluation of Piece/Performance
We started the piece with the question: What makes someone who they are, nature or nurture? And looking at our piece - without the questions at the start and the end - I'm not sure the audience would get that that was the question our piece was trying to pose.
There are parts in our piece which allude to nature and nurture's factors: for example the race for sperm to fertilise the egg implies how genetics affects who we become. I don't really think our piece overtly presents a selection of answers about what makes a person who they are all the time but I don't know if this is so much of a problem because I think that when you are making art you should allow it to mutate and evolve. I think we started with the stimulus of nature vs. nurture and it became about facts and cycles of life and what we all go through as human beings. I feel like our piece was very moving and it might not have been such if we tried to force the questions.
Performance in group piece
I felt exhausted before our performance and so was not overly enthusiastic before we started to perform but once we started I found myself feeding off the audience's energy and the realisation that this was the first time they were seeing it. It was this fresh energy which made the performances fresh and exciting for us.
It was interesting to see audience members' reactions to our interactive approach I think all of the audience members I asked the questions to during the beginning section were scared but some of them responded to all of the questions and some only responded to the questions they were comfortable with. This made me feel uncomfortable in asking the questions because I felt like I was intruding for no reason but I had to power through. It made me think about how taboo the topic of nature vs. nurture can be and how this can make it difficult to understand the topic.
By the third performance, I did feel physically exhausted and because my character's quirk was a shaky hand. I felt my hand and lower arm cramp during the performance.
Installation
Although I felt that visually our piece wasn't necessarily stunning, I felt like the struggle me and Shayde went through during the performance was clear and this attracted the audience to our piece because there were sections of our performance where it was clear we were actually struggling. During the last performance of our piece there was a part where I was struggling because the water had gone up my nose and I couldn't breathe out my mouth because I had an apple in my mouth. During the last performance I felt my piece being pushed a bit more, I felt like I really pushed the rage aspect of my getting the apple and this made it more enjoyable and interesting for me as an actor.
One thing I liked about the nature of our piece was the endurance aspect because it never felt repetitive or boring for me and Shayde, it always felt fresh and new. With endurance it never gets boring and hopefully this freshness was translated to the audience.
Evaluation of whole piece as a theatre product
I think as a theatre product The Cabinet of Curiosities works quite well due to the breadth of performance in the space, not only are there art installations but there are also ensemble pieces and the whole piece feels united and grounded when the whole ensemble comes together at the denouement of the piece. I think one of the strengths of our pieces as a theatre product is the autonomy the piece gives the audience. There are points when the audience are free to choose what they watch but there are also points where they are guided. This variation in audience experience makes our show varied and appealing to audience members.
Today we tried an activity designed by Forced Entertainment. Each person began with a selection of images. At first I found it difficult to make a story which was entertaining to me due to the lack of links between the images. But once I gave up trying to let the story make sense and let it be outlandish it became far easier.
When we first shared it as a class in pairs, there was a lot of emphasis on setting and I think it's because there is a major emphasis on setting in the stories that we view through TV and Film. It is a lot more of a challenge to focus on a detail in a picture in order to compose a story but I think it is worth looking at the details in pictures because often details are the most interesting things which have much to expand upon compared to a big glaring detail.
When me and Eloise did our story as a group, the form we chose was a game of Chinese whispers. We planned to tell the story we had created with the stories through the game of Chinese whispers. When it came to the performance we realised how difficult it was to tell a whole story through Chinese whispers, it was very difficult for Hannah to remember all that I had told her and so it was difficult for her to pass it on to the next person. It wasn't as successful or clever as it had seemed in my head but what it taught me is how story should be at the centre of all things. The question should be: What form or structure would best compliment this story? Your primary concern shouldn't be what is the most innovative form to tell the story with. I think art becomes indulgent when it does that and veers away from truth. Even though our work is experimental this term, this does not mean we should lose emphasis on the truth, no matter how stilted and twisted it may be.
This exercise was interesting for me because at first I found it frustrating because I found it really hard to turn the corners sharply and stick to the lines and I also kept on bumping into people but as the exercise progressed I learnt that there were ways to manoeuvre physically to negotiate when I came too close to a person which involved moving in the other direction swiftly which sounds simple now that I'm writing it but in practise was more difficult. I think it may have been because the action had not entered my body yet and my mind was not focused on the activity. As soon as my mind started to focus on the activity, it just made sense to turn a corner when someone might collide with me, this didn't happen when I hadn't warmed my mind to the exercise.
In terms of drawing meaning from the exercise, I felt like the constant moving in different patterns of lines portrayed indecision and it felt skittish when I was doing it. It was similiar to Stanislavski in the sense that we were working from an action to get to an emotion, although in this case it was a somewhat strenuous physical action. When I watched Josh doing the exercise I thought he had a sense of being galvanised behind his movement and it was really interesting to watch, I'm not sure if it was because he was so focussed on the thing that he wanted because by this point we had added the incentive of the thing we really wanted. It almost looked like he was a scientist of some sort looking for an answer to a question because of how motivated he was by it and I guess the same rules go in experimental as physical, one must have a sense of internal motivation for the performance to be engaging. I only found out afterwards that the stopping and starting of the background music was deliberate in an attempt to annoy and therefore distract us but I found it so difficult to turn the corners to begin with that this didn't really annoy me, I just thought there was difficulty with the sound. Later on, when we were doing the game where the aim was to tap the back of the other person's knee, things really started to literally heat up. It was during the middle of this game that I actually thought I can't continue. I just found it so tiring and I really wanted to stop but at the same time I didn't because I knew the point of all of it was to push your limits. It's interesting when your physical side is telling you you can't do something and your mental side is pushing you to. I think I like that feeling of struggle because even when I go jogging and I get tired and that same sensation comes over me, I try and do the same thing, I try and mentally pull myself through. The next exercise we did was by far my favourite because it had objectives for each person e.g to get away from your lover and it gave it a sense of internal justification and it felt very similiar to physical theatre for me. I was with Troy and we were both finding interesting, fluid ways to achieve our objectives. And linking to what I said in the last paragraph because there was that strong internal justification and motivation I managed to pull through despite being quite physically tired. I understood the meaning behind the letter on the various vertices of the boxes exercise which I think was meant to have a similiar purpose as the exercises above, to generate movement based on internal motivation - especially when we had to spell out meaningful sentences but I found it slightly tedious because it was so difficult to remember where I had put all the letters and so the exercise of touching the letters in an interesting way was difficult. I thought that the group improvised piece we did was good despite this mainly because of Josh's idea to lift me than transition into the "shush" which made it fluid and it worked. I think one thing I took from the first lesson is although this term is experimental and literally anything goes the experimental piece that you make must be rooted in the ideas of the stimulus. For example in the lesson our stimulus was Antonin Artaud's The Spurt of Blood and I felt that when we were devising and performing our experimental versions of the text and when we saw other groups performances of the text it didn't actually stem from ideas in the text. I think one of the reasons this might have happened is that the text is really difficult to comprehend. Even looking at the text now I still don't understand what the point of it is. But maybe this is because I am looking at things from a naturalistic perspective. I just think all art should be truthful and if you are given a stimulus you should at least root your performance in it. There were interesting uses of space and lighting in all the performances for example when we were seated in rows during Kim's group's performance I thought that worked really well and I thought the spatial dynamics were really well thought out. I had another idea while we were midway through devising our piece but because we weren't allowed to use words and my idea involved words: I noticed that on the first page there was a contrast in moods between the sardonic love scene of the YOUNG MAN and YOUNG GIRL and the dark lewd content of the dialogue between the KNIGHT and WET NURSE.
I would have had the Young Man and Young Girl scene occur then after the Young Man's last line I would have had the earthquake happen with the objects like the stars being physicalised with breaks of seconds of darkness in which the YOUNG MAN and YOUNG GIRL would escape out of the door in 905. The people who would physicalise and make a soundscape of the things in the earthquake would still be present and moving even after the YOUNG MAN and YOUNG GIRL left the room even as the KNIGHT and WET NURSE started their dialogue
I just watched a video of Franko B performing 'I Miss You' at the Tate and it was interesting because although it was simple it was still interesting and I still wanted to watch it. It was the stark imagery of his naked and very white body with the mismatched chords of the music. It was just enchanting in that way. But also, the pauses that he held when he went to each edge of the runway drew me in because you never knew when he would start walking again. It feels like something I could just rewatch over and over again.
Watching I'm Thinking of You was almost hypnotic and the thing that struck me about it was the fact that because he never stopped swinging you never could quite fully look at him before he went away again. Again I could sit and watch it for hours in a calming way. This reminds me of when you see a metal ball on a pendulum swinging back and forth. You also notice from watching it over and over again how beautiful the glide of the swing is a it goes back and forth.
Unfortunately some of the photos that I took are not publishing properly but one of the overwhelming motifs of the art that I liked or responded to was shadows or an element of darkness. I think what's interesting abut shadows is how they are often used as metaphors for darkness in a person. Also the feeling that you're never alone because your shadow is always with you.
The thing that drew me in about this was the fact that you could walk into a room with that spider hanging from the ceiling and not know unless you looked up. I guess this links in with the motif of not knowing something dark and sinister is always following you, that ignorance of the darkness that is looming around you.
Again this picture had the shadow and in this case I guess the strange thing about it is the shadow does not seem to mirror the girl in the picture emphasising the idea that the shadow may in fact be another darkness not reflective of the girl.
I really liked this because not only did it have that surreal aspect to it. It was also subversive and felt like the surrealism stemmed from a place of truth. The thing I thought when I was looking at it was the idea of a person being trapped, specifically a woman.
Linked with the work above, when I looked at this picture and various other pictures by Bourgeois which were a similiar style to the one above was the idea of womanhood and the pain behind womanhood. The red and the blurring of the blood in the pieces of art made me think of period blood and the pain behind becoming a woman.
The thing that drew me to this was its simplicity but also its complexity in the sense that it has this darkness. You don't quite know what lies within the darkness and the ambiguity was interesting to me.
I think what drew me to this was the barrenness and the fact that even though you can't depict the waste and barren quality of the picture in 3D, the 2-Dimensional nature of the picture adds to the wasteland effect because it makes it look as if the rubbish has been heaped and the painter has taken a cross section of the waste in that dump.
This photo is interesting because it is coming from darkness and is looking outward into the light. You have the feeling that you are in some ways at the root of this dark place. Also there's a loneliness in the photo which is exemplified by the chairs. I can't quite explain why the chairs make the picture so lonely maybe it is because they are empty.
Concept: Using three of the photos above I have an idea for a piece which involves a birth of some sort. The 'thing' which is birthed than proceeds to strangle and suffocate the birther/female energy and in order to free herself the 'thing' must be put back inside her creating a reverse birth.As I was thinking about this idea I thought about how women struggle with post-natal depression and how perhaps this links to that.
I think this represents the place where the thing is birthed from eventually this scar could grow as the thing is being birthed.
I think this is representation of the female energy although the female energy will be abstract.
Maybe the thing she births is simply darkness, her own darkness and thus it has to be swallowed back up again.
This represents the stage of her being trapped by something she has birthed herself.
*****
The quote that is in the title of this post is from an article Sarah Kane wrote for The Guardian in 1998 when she was putting on Crave at the Edinburgh Festival. I didn't really understand what she meant at first but when I read the sentence again I started to get it. We use performance to describe a lot of things including one of the main allusions in the article: football. And although maybe before reading this article I would have taken issue with someone comparing football to theatrical performance, I'm now starting to see the viewpoint I had beforehand as slightly pretentious and I'm starting to see what Kane means. That feeling that you get when someone scores a goal unexpectedly, that thrill almost feeling revived as if your life makes sense is what you should feel during performance and if I'm honest it's something I rarely if ever feel at the theatre and if I have felt it I haven't felt it for a long time. I think what she says is timely and I think there's a tendency for theatre to become so assigned to knowledgeable audiences that endless revivals are programmed that ironically don't give you that revived feeling.
