"Increasingly, I’m finding performance much more interesting than acting, theatre more compelling than plays."

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.