I’m really interested with playing with people senses. By this I mean that when we go to a theatre we are used to sitting, watching and listening to a performance. In my final performance I really like the idea of either taking away the vision of audience members by using eye masks or the hearing of audience members by using head phones. I then started to think a little further and thought maybe I could do half and half so that half the audience experience something different to what the other half experience. I also like the idea of having something which makes no sense what so ever. I think all this will break the audiences expectation when they walk into a theatre. I think is something which once I have an idea will take minimal planning, but getting a firm idea will be difficult as there are so many things I could experiment with.
Following my idea of having half the audience with headphones and half the audience with eye masks I set out to find some videos I could use where the sound did not match the action in the video. This turned out to be much more difficult then what I thought.
Here are a few I found:
Video 1: True resistant test by Olympic athletes, Trojan condom manufactures
I thought this video was a good example of something you would not be able to guess the full content of unless you could see AND hear it, which no audience member would be able to. Even if just watching the video without being able to hear it you would not be able to guess what is going on. To test this I tried it out on my housemates, one could jut see the video and one could just hear, neither of them were able to guess correctly what was being advertised.
Video 2: CadburyUK Crispello advert (2013)
When trying out this video with my housemate the one with just sight thought that the advert was about a brother and sister which is very very far from the truth! The person wearing headphones had absolutely no idea.
I have tried to research into performances which were similar to mine, the results were somewhat minimal. Amy Taubin’s Double Occupancy (1976) interested me, she gave her audience the option to stay and watch her or to got o the adjacent room to listen to her. Those who chose to watch her only saw her whispering into a microphone so quietly that they could not hear her. This idea is similar to mine in that the audience can only see or hear the performance and not both.
I will continue further research into videos that I can use for my performance.
Taubin, Amy (1976) Double Occupancy found in:
Carroll, Noel (1979) Amy Taubin: The Solo Self, The Drama Review: TDR Vol.23 No.1 Autoperformance Issue pp.51-58,USA: MIT Press
Video 1:
Trojan condom manufactures (2012) True resistant test by Olympic athletes, AKA: For sport lovers / Don’t try this at home, Published by Trojan condom manufactures, London, England.
Accessed online March 2013 at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oedba4wqlcs
After asking anyone and everyone I know if they have any sound proof headphones there was a word I was getting used to hearing;
‘No.’
It appeared that getting phones that block out sound completely was proving to be difficult, so I decided to do a little DIY. After finding some headphones that muffle sound I used cotton wool to block out the sound even more. This seemed to have worked, until I got to a different location and watched the same video at the same volume. After trying a few other way of blocking out the sound I wasn’t having any luck and short from buying some professional sound blocking headphone from online for a lot of money there wasn’t much else I could do.
It was time to start looking at other ideas as I decided that if the audience could even hear the sound a little bit it would still defeat the object of my performance. I started to look into a different area of performing that I hadn’t experienced very much; performance art.
From the start I was interested in doing a piece that made no sense what so ever, much like in the style of Dada performances. I started to look at smaller scale performance art performers, so I took to youtube to find some videos posted by people.
Two of my favourites were:
Video 1: Performed by Olivier de Sagazan in 2008.
I like this video because it isn’t about understanding what it happening, there is no explanation given to understand, it is completely up to you to interpret it as you wish. I’m not one to try and understand a piece like this and just watch and enjoy instead. If I had to give my own explanation about what was going on it would be to do with the fact that he keeps putting layers of what looks like clay on his face, and these layers cover up who he really is, each creating a new appearance for himself. When he digs through it all at the end it could be him deciding that he isn’t happy with whatever new appearance he creates and wants back his old original one…but that’s just my own take on it!
Another favourite of mine which I think took amazing talent and planning is
Video2: Penwald: 2: 8 circles” a performance by Tony Orrico hosted by Cultural Programs of the National Academy of Sciences at the Keck Center, Washington DC on Thursday, May 20, 2010.
The description for this video states that “Using the dimensions of his body as measure, Orrico references geometry, biomechanics, endurance, and ideas represented by da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. His performance challenges constructed ideas about what constitutes art and where it can be seen.”
The fact that he took into account all of the above factors and so carefully planned every part of the performance to end up with the final finished piece shows how much he was committed to art and the level of endurance needed to carry out the whole performance shows hard work and careful planning and training.
What I like about these two piece of performance art is that they both show two opposite ends of the spectrum of which performance art has. The first video shows no sign of months of planning and looks effortless, for all we know he could of thought of that performance within the same week in which it was performed, yet in the second video we see that such a piece require a lot of planning and if you made a mistake it would be a lot more obvious to the human eye, where as in the first video if Olivier made a mistake we would not know. Despite both of these performance being very different they both still caught my attention equally.
After researching into performance art and looking at how something little could have a big impact I have decided that for my final performance I would like to do something small for eight minutes. A few ideas came to me such as;
Making toast
Tying my shoelaces
Slow motion sneezing
spending 8 minutes to close the door then get to the centre of the stage and the lighths go down.
Writing a word.
I don’t know if anyone has ever tried slow motion sneezing for eight minutes but it is very difficult!
Works cited:
Orrico, Tony (2010) Penwald: 2: 8 hosted by Cultural Programs of the National Academy of Sciences at the Keck Center, Washington DC
Accessed online April 2013 at:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vldw0qs3A8
With only two weeks to go and ever changing ideas it was time to decide on a final idea. Still focusing on the number 8 I decided that every minute of my performance a slide was going to pop up saying what had happened in the last minute/2 minutes etc around the world. I then thought a little further and decided that I could film something over the period of eight hours and then speed it up so that it shows for 8 minutes, and throughout the video the slides showing what has happened over the eight minutes could be shown. I chose to film my back garden as it showed the changing weather throughout the day. As my camera only filmed for half an hour I had to load each video onto my laptop every 30 minutes and then start again so the video was not continuous. Seen as my dogs are in and out of the garden all day there was no way I could cut them out of the video but decided they were much of a bother because they were part of the natural course of the day, as were my dad and brother working on the garden. Never being a fan of technology the situation was not made any better when I filmed the final part when the sun set, put it on my laptop, and then it completely vanished and was no where to be seen on my laptop or the camera, so I had done a whole days filming for nothing. The next day I filmed again, and (I can’t believe it either) the final video did not work again. I was not going to do a whole other days filming, and couldn’t just film night time of a different day as my garden had been changed slightly, things weren’t on the washing line, a big object in the middle of the garden had been moved etc. Once I had edited all the videos to make an eight minute video in movie maker I decided to put a sepia effect on it as I liked the old style it gave it and covered for the fact that there was no sunset.
This is the end project:
I decided to cut the video of my garden down to seven minutes and then to add on a video of myself eating my breakfast and music (which will both be explained in the next post)
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