Friday, 17 October 2008
Monday, 13 October 2008
Not I
Another film from the process. Wha is it with me and food-related tasks? I guess it's just that the addition of food to a performative exercise is not only unusual to see, but it also adds so many interesting dimensions to a performance - issues of disgust, pain, abjection, violation, emotion, involuntary actions, fluids, sounds, smells...
Saturday, 11 October 2008
Open Space... and some thoughts on Aesthetics
A week ago, my performers and I staged 'The Failure Project' at Open Space, part of the International Workshops Festival. A very weird experience...
All that time ago, when I first sent in my application form to be considered for Open Space, I was very early on in the process. I didn't even have my performers back then, except for Hayley, and the whole piece was a speck in my mind at that point.
We arrived on the Saturday and immediately, two elements jumped out at me that worried me - firstly, the space was MASSIVE. Much bigger than Performance Space 1. I was concerned that the space would be too big for my performers, and would drown out the piece. We didn't have much time to deal with the bigness of the space either. Secondly, the lighting. I already knew that the lighting of the space would be simple - that's fine, I thought, we can deal with that. I had read on the website that there was a lighting rig and thought we could come up with something simple but atmospheric. When I arrived, I realised that by 'simple' lighting, they meant 'the lightbulbs on the ceiling' - no lighting rig at all. AH!
OK, I thought, never mind, we still have the music, our props, and most importantly of all, the performers, their tasks, and their interactions with each other and the audience.
So evening came along and it was time to perform - we were third out of four pieces to be shown that night (the other three pieces were all dances). I took my seat and watched my performers on stage.
My first instinct was: it's bombing. In fact I whispered to my boyfriend in the middle of it "(the audience hate it!)". My boyfriend looked at me and nodded in sympathy. Oh bloody hell. My performers marched through the performance valiently, giving it energy, trying to use as much of the space as they could, trying to connect with the spectators, but they didn't have an audience to bounce off of like they usually do. Which is fair enough, I guess - the audience are not obliged to do anything.
Sarah Jane told me that she had received some really positive comments after the show from audience members who had come up to her...Mandy also had the theory that dance audiences tend to be very subdued in general, whether they like something or not. I don't know about that...So was I wrong in thinking it went badly? I won't get the chance to receive proper feedback from the audience there that night so I probably won't ever know. I have confidence in this piece, and in the performers. So I don't feel bad about Open Space. But for me, what I was watching in front of me that night felt - as alien and strange.
What became clear to me on that night is just how much of the piece has been constructed and designed. I hadn't realised, but I made it for Performance Space 1, and outside of that context, without the lighting I had designed, with the restrictions on our actions due to the dance floor, without any of the filmed material, the atmosphere was completely transformed. This is reassuring for me to know. I had been having some problems before the festival about the aesthetics of the piece - despite all my talk about construction the design of the piece is fairly minimalist (I think), with many elements dependant on the improvisational nature of the piece, and I was worried that people could then conclude that because it wasn't conventionally beautiful, I hadn't put any thought into it. Having now seen the difference it makes to the piece, I don't think that now.
So where does that leave us in terms of taking the piece to other places? I still want to, and I don't think I have to compromise the peice in order to do so. So if I'm going to find a way of negotionating these two worries, I need to take the same time I did in creating the aesthetic for the original piece, in order to create a NEW aesthetic for a NEW space and context. A one hour technical rehearsal, never having seen the soace before,is not going to cut it.
All that time ago, when I first sent in my application form to be considered for Open Space, I was very early on in the process. I didn't even have my performers back then, except for Hayley, and the whole piece was a speck in my mind at that point.
We arrived on the Saturday and immediately, two elements jumped out at me that worried me - firstly, the space was MASSIVE. Much bigger than Performance Space 1. I was concerned that the space would be too big for my performers, and would drown out the piece. We didn't have much time to deal with the bigness of the space either. Secondly, the lighting. I already knew that the lighting of the space would be simple - that's fine, I thought, we can deal with that. I had read on the website that there was a lighting rig and thought we could come up with something simple but atmospheric. When I arrived, I realised that by 'simple' lighting, they meant 'the lightbulbs on the ceiling' - no lighting rig at all. AH!
OK, I thought, never mind, we still have the music, our props, and most importantly of all, the performers, their tasks, and their interactions with each other and the audience.
So evening came along and it was time to perform - we were third out of four pieces to be shown that night (the other three pieces were all dances). I took my seat and watched my performers on stage.
My first instinct was: it's bombing. In fact I whispered to my boyfriend in the middle of it "(the audience hate it!)". My boyfriend looked at me and nodded in sympathy. Oh bloody hell. My performers marched through the performance valiently, giving it energy, trying to use as much of the space as they could, trying to connect with the spectators, but they didn't have an audience to bounce off of like they usually do. Which is fair enough, I guess - the audience are not obliged to do anything.
Sarah Jane told me that she had received some really positive comments after the show from audience members who had come up to her...Mandy also had the theory that dance audiences tend to be very subdued in general, whether they like something or not. I don't know about that...So was I wrong in thinking it went badly? I won't get the chance to receive proper feedback from the audience there that night so I probably won't ever know. I have confidence in this piece, and in the performers. So I don't feel bad about Open Space. But for me, what I was watching in front of me that night felt - as alien and strange.
What became clear to me on that night is just how much of the piece has been constructed and designed. I hadn't realised, but I made it for Performance Space 1, and outside of that context, without the lighting I had designed, with the restrictions on our actions due to the dance floor, without any of the filmed material, the atmosphere was completely transformed. This is reassuring for me to know. I had been having some problems before the festival about the aesthetics of the piece - despite all my talk about construction the design of the piece is fairly minimalist (I think), with many elements dependant on the improvisational nature of the piece, and I was worried that people could then conclude that because it wasn't conventionally beautiful, I hadn't put any thought into it. Having now seen the difference it makes to the piece, I don't think that now.
So where does that leave us in terms of taking the piece to other places? I still want to, and I don't think I have to compromise the peice in order to do so. So if I'm going to find a way of negotionating these two worries, I need to take the same time I did in creating the aesthetic for the original piece, in order to create a NEW aesthetic for a NEW space and context. A one hour technical rehearsal, never having seen the soace before,is not going to cut it.
Friday, 10 October 2008
Yes, Lets
An epic tale of an afternoon spent with The Failure Project performers. The game 'yes, let's'...played to the extreme. The idea was to get everyone feeling more comfortable with each other, to open up, to be silly, to let go.
Thursday, 2 October 2008
Retrospective
Apologies for the lack of posting recently. I have meant to write something here quite a few times in the past couple of weeks, but with the festival and everything, I have had barely enough time to think, let alone write a coherent blog.
But now that the festival has finished…Ahhh. Time for the retrospective post, the one written after it’s all over, though for me it isn’t really since I will be continuing with my investigations into failure at least until I have graduated. The post filled with snappy lines about how much we’ve all learnt. Sorry, just realised how sarcastic that sounds. For me at least, I have learnt a massive amount. The process of putting on a piece in general, any piece, has been a valuable experience just in terms of the practical stuff, of setting up lighting, props, sound, of putting all the technical stuff into place, organising rehearsals and, yes, health and safety (shudder). Of course I’ve done all this before, but never as the sole, lone director.
Directing (or facilitating, whatever you wanna call what I did) four other performers has also taken me on a huge learning curve – I had to discover a tougher, more assured side to my personality and basically be a ‘leader’, which is something I had to work on as it doesn’t come naturally to me. When my boyfriend Jefferson (who wrote and animated the text shown in the film) came to watch a rehearsal, he commented afterwards on how weird it was to see me be authoritative. I had to watch each rehearsal like a hawk, concentrating on everything I saw and detecting the relationships and dynamics of each performer to the tasks, the other performers, me, and themselves, using these observations to inform how I then devised each following task, considering who did what and with whom. I won’t go into the details now of what exactly I perceived these dynamics and relationships to be – this isn’t the right forum to go spilling into a psychological analysis of everyone. And anyway, perhaps the performers already have a clue of what my observations might have been. But it has become clear to me that this was one of the most important elements of this process – that I try and gain as much information as possible about these performers and everything that made them tick (which is why as well as my own observations, we would spend a lot of time in each rehearsal chatting about how each task felt for each performer. I also gave each performer a questionnaire to fill in, and invited two other people to witness rehearsals and discuss with me their own observations).
This emphasis on the uniqueness and individual personality of each performer during the process, and then in the piece itself, was crucial – the piece was about stripping away, or peeking through, the layers of artifice, or ‘performance’, that we see on stage so often, exposing the human being that is live, in the flesh, there on the stage in front of us. Of witnessing a piece of theatre that was truly present, live, ‘now’ through witnessing struggle, weakness, failure.
My performers were performing, and not performing, at the same time.
Am I talking rubbish? I feel like I’m going off on one…
In general, I think I am a better director, deviser, practitioner, than I was at the beginning of this process. I still think that ‘failure’ has not been exhausted as a concept. I also think there are ways that I could have made the piece better – for example…I had always seen three shows as three experiments, and marketed it to audiences that way. The way I devised it, as improvisational and task-based, fitted this too. I tried as much as I could, therefore, to change the variables of each of these experiments, changing the music each night, changing the nature of Sarah Jane’s tasks (both in the messages she reveals to the audience and the structure of the tasks themselves), and of course, as it was improvisational, expecting the performers to improvise with new material every night, approaching the tasks in new ways each time and giving the audience new information in the introduction and conclusion. I do think, however, I could have gone even further with it – ideally, I wanted to change the order of the tasks, perhaps play around with the lighting or sound more, even give them new tasks – for obvious practical reasons, however, none of this was really possible. In terms of the course and what I was required to do, it would have been too messy to change all this stuff, too much like I didn’t have a clue what I was doing and just changing stuff for the sake of it rather than to actually examine if it changed the nature of the performance, and anyway, the technical and production staff wouldn’t have stood for it.
Watching the piece in the three performances was a strange experience for me – I felt a great sense of pride at seeing my ‘baby’ up there on stage, obviously, and it was very gratifying to hear the audiences responses (whether it was laughter, applause, cheering, or even in some cases, sighing and noises of frustration or suspense). I was also proud that the performers threw themselves into it so much – each of them, in different ways, whether emotionally or physically, pushed themselves in the live performances, and revealed more and more of themselves. It’s not an easy thing to do. There will always be a certain amount of self-censorship present in people, but given more time with this group, I can’t help but think about the possibilities, about developing this idea of exposure into different areas, different types of performance, different questions, etc. etc. I wonder what the performers have taken from the experience – hopefully, they will have gained, in some sense, a better awareness of their own behaviours, they way they think and behave not just in performance but in everyday life.
The audience responses were very interesting too – many audience members were torn between laughter and discomfort, between wanting the performers to succeed and wanting them to fail. Let’s take, for example, Darren’s scene, and the range of responses it garnered. Some found it entertaining and funny, some found it deeply uncomfortable (the most difficult task to watch, in fact). As the performers and I discussed recently, some cheered whenever Darren caught a sweet in his mouth – but only so that he could fill his mouth completely and fail and the speech task. Many people seemed thoughtful after the show, and wanted to ask more questions and find out more about the process. All of these responses are brilliant to me – firstly, because it is just so interesting discovering how people respond to what are very emotive topics (success and failure). Secondly, because I wanted to play with these emotions by juxtaposing them – some people recalled laughing and then feeling very uncomfortable straight afterwards, wishing someone to fail then feeling very guilty for wishing that in the first place, feeling upset at someone’s failure then seeing something that suddenly renders the whole thing ridiculous, or finding the whole thing entertaining but then being struck by and suddenly realising a performer’s emotional and physical investment, or exposure, in a scene. Thirdly, I didn’t want to stamp my own opinions too much onto the piece. I wanted to create an experience that encouraged each spectator to bring their own personalities to the piece and how they viewed it, creating their own version of events, if you like.
I think I’m babbling…
I’m glad I have done this piece, and that I have done it with these performers. It has been a long, difficult, tiring, sometimes exhausting and exasperating experience. It has also been littered with failures. But I am so glad I have done it.
But now that the festival has finished…Ahhh. Time for the retrospective post, the one written after it’s all over, though for me it isn’t really since I will be continuing with my investigations into failure at least until I have graduated. The post filled with snappy lines about how much we’ve all learnt. Sorry, just realised how sarcastic that sounds. For me at least, I have learnt a massive amount. The process of putting on a piece in general, any piece, has been a valuable experience just in terms of the practical stuff, of setting up lighting, props, sound, of putting all the technical stuff into place, organising rehearsals and, yes, health and safety (shudder). Of course I’ve done all this before, but never as the sole, lone director.
Directing (or facilitating, whatever you wanna call what I did) four other performers has also taken me on a huge learning curve – I had to discover a tougher, more assured side to my personality and basically be a ‘leader’, which is something I had to work on as it doesn’t come naturally to me. When my boyfriend Jefferson (who wrote and animated the text shown in the film) came to watch a rehearsal, he commented afterwards on how weird it was to see me be authoritative. I had to watch each rehearsal like a hawk, concentrating on everything I saw and detecting the relationships and dynamics of each performer to the tasks, the other performers, me, and themselves, using these observations to inform how I then devised each following task, considering who did what and with whom. I won’t go into the details now of what exactly I perceived these dynamics and relationships to be – this isn’t the right forum to go spilling into a psychological analysis of everyone. And anyway, perhaps the performers already have a clue of what my observations might have been. But it has become clear to me that this was one of the most important elements of this process – that I try and gain as much information as possible about these performers and everything that made them tick (which is why as well as my own observations, we would spend a lot of time in each rehearsal chatting about how each task felt for each performer. I also gave each performer a questionnaire to fill in, and invited two other people to witness rehearsals and discuss with me their own observations).
This emphasis on the uniqueness and individual personality of each performer during the process, and then in the piece itself, was crucial – the piece was about stripping away, or peeking through, the layers of artifice, or ‘performance’, that we see on stage so often, exposing the human being that is live, in the flesh, there on the stage in front of us. Of witnessing a piece of theatre that was truly present, live, ‘now’ through witnessing struggle, weakness, failure.
My performers were performing, and not performing, at the same time.
Am I talking rubbish? I feel like I’m going off on one…
In general, I think I am a better director, deviser, practitioner, than I was at the beginning of this process. I still think that ‘failure’ has not been exhausted as a concept. I also think there are ways that I could have made the piece better – for example…I had always seen three shows as three experiments, and marketed it to audiences that way. The way I devised it, as improvisational and task-based, fitted this too. I tried as much as I could, therefore, to change the variables of each of these experiments, changing the music each night, changing the nature of Sarah Jane’s tasks (both in the messages she reveals to the audience and the structure of the tasks themselves), and of course, as it was improvisational, expecting the performers to improvise with new material every night, approaching the tasks in new ways each time and giving the audience new information in the introduction and conclusion. I do think, however, I could have gone even further with it – ideally, I wanted to change the order of the tasks, perhaps play around with the lighting or sound more, even give them new tasks – for obvious practical reasons, however, none of this was really possible. In terms of the course and what I was required to do, it would have been too messy to change all this stuff, too much like I didn’t have a clue what I was doing and just changing stuff for the sake of it rather than to actually examine if it changed the nature of the performance, and anyway, the technical and production staff wouldn’t have stood for it.
Watching the piece in the three performances was a strange experience for me – I felt a great sense of pride at seeing my ‘baby’ up there on stage, obviously, and it was very gratifying to hear the audiences responses (whether it was laughter, applause, cheering, or even in some cases, sighing and noises of frustration or suspense). I was also proud that the performers threw themselves into it so much – each of them, in different ways, whether emotionally or physically, pushed themselves in the live performances, and revealed more and more of themselves. It’s not an easy thing to do. There will always be a certain amount of self-censorship present in people, but given more time with this group, I can’t help but think about the possibilities, about developing this idea of exposure into different areas, different types of performance, different questions, etc. etc. I wonder what the performers have taken from the experience – hopefully, they will have gained, in some sense, a better awareness of their own behaviours, they way they think and behave not just in performance but in everyday life.
The audience responses were very interesting too – many audience members were torn between laughter and discomfort, between wanting the performers to succeed and wanting them to fail. Let’s take, for example, Darren’s scene, and the range of responses it garnered. Some found it entertaining and funny, some found it deeply uncomfortable (the most difficult task to watch, in fact). As the performers and I discussed recently, some cheered whenever Darren caught a sweet in his mouth – but only so that he could fill his mouth completely and fail and the speech task. Many people seemed thoughtful after the show, and wanted to ask more questions and find out more about the process. All of these responses are brilliant to me – firstly, because it is just so interesting discovering how people respond to what are very emotive topics (success and failure). Secondly, because I wanted to play with these emotions by juxtaposing them – some people recalled laughing and then feeling very uncomfortable straight afterwards, wishing someone to fail then feeling very guilty for wishing that in the first place, feeling upset at someone’s failure then seeing something that suddenly renders the whole thing ridiculous, or finding the whole thing entertaining but then being struck by and suddenly realising a performer’s emotional and physical investment, or exposure, in a scene. Thirdly, I didn’t want to stamp my own opinions too much onto the piece. I wanted to create an experience that encouraged each spectator to bring their own personalities to the piece and how they viewed it, creating their own version of events, if you like.
I think I’m babbling…
I’m glad I have done this piece, and that I have done it with these performers. It has been a long, difficult, tiring, sometimes exhausting and exasperating experience. It has also been littered with failures. But I am so glad I have done it.
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