Videos!

While faffing around on the laptop I realised that there were a few more videos of the process which I haven't uploaded onto the blog...so here they are. They are ones I made to accompany the dissertation and focus on particular elements of my arguments.

In the meantime...

Thoughts on how the Scratch went, and future plans, are coming up in the next few days, but until then... time for another word cloud? Yes!

At the start of something new...

It’s been an unusually busy week this week, which goes some way to explaining why my mood has been a lot brighter this week, too. I still have no job (not enough experience for properly paid jobs, too much experience for trainee jobs, too poor for unpaid internships) but things are looking up for the week ahead as I start a few new projects (more details in the future).

Things are up and running with The Failure Project: Part Two, in what has fast become a bit of a whistle-stop rehearsal process. Some things I learnt: collaborative work cannot function fully without someone, ultimately, being in charge. Especially if you’re working on a piece with your mates and are easily distracted by cups of tea and general matey chit-chat. Since this is my ‘baby’, as it were (although I hope I would not be so precious with it as that) I am taking on more of a directorial air, although for some reason have been reluctant to take on the role fully, something that will need to be remedied if we go and perform it in different venues in April and May (which is looking likely). It needs a more defined focus, a drive, but for now, for our Scratch performance this Saturday, we’ll be OK. Luckily, it’s the sort of thing that actually benefits from more talk and less actual rehearsing – the more you rehearse, the more you practice and cushion yourself against the risk of truly exposing yourself physically and mentally. And I have to say, there is a naughty thrill in knowing you have a performance in a couple of days and you haven’t rehearsed it…who knows how it will turn out (which, again, is sort of the point).

What we’ve done is develop a 15-minute version of the opening and closing scenes from the original piece, in which we introduce ourselves and then undergo our separate tasks simultaneously. I’m used to creating task from others through careful observation and questioning but this time, I’ve also had the strange experience of assigning my own task, something I was against doing but had to as the other participants couldn’t think of anything for me (which in itself is interesting – was it because I have resisted revealing much of myself to them? Because they haven’t noticed my foibles (or haven’t wanted to notice)? Or because I’m so boring I have none?). I ended up picking something that I think focuses on something that makes me tick, but is it how possible is it to have that sort of objective insight into oneself? And what kind of mental processes are necessary in order to make such a decision (besides masochism?!)? Maybe I’ll have a better idea on Saturday and in the weeks ahead as we continue with development. Hopefully there’ll also be some photos and films to show in the days/weeks ahead, too. Will post soon with news on how it went.

A note on performance and confession

Since the last time I wrote here, quite a lot has happened, performance-wise – myself and three colleagues from Central decided to make the leap and officially form a performance group (I say ‘officially’ but nothing official actually happened, we just sort of sat around a table and said, OK, enough faffing, let’s do it), came up with a name (Jeremis Iron Arts Collective), entered the 21st Century and set up email and twitter accounts, and started a blog which is not completely underway yet. And of course, we worked on some pieces – The Failure Project (part two) is well underway as well as a little acorn of an idea which we hope to shown in May.

I don’t think I mentioned this before but I have also been asked to help out as an assistant director with a piece being put together by an old friend from University, due to be shown at the Brighton Fringe Festival. All in the early stages but it promises to be an interesting few months ahead and it gives me something to focus on while I struggle to get a job that isn’t completely mind-numbing and depressing and hopefully even get paid for doing it.

Anyway, back to the point of this post…so, as ever, this edition of the Failure Project continues with the same ideas of exposure, risk, of showing the ‘real’, etc. etc. And so in preparation for our first intensive all-day rehearsal we have decided to fill in a number of different questionnaires designed to help us all learn about each other more in order to develop the right tasks for the piece, to give us ideas for exercises and games during the day, and to get us all used to the heightened openness and honesty required of the piece.

I’m talking about this now because it seems to coincide with a few things: my entrance into the strange and pointless world of Twitter, a recent trend I’ve noticed on Facebook for people to fill in and send to their friends a note called ‘25 things you don’t know about me’, and a recent performance of Forced Entertainment’s durational performance Speak Bitterness which was streamed live on the internet.

It seems everyone wants to confess, to reveal in public, these days, and I wonder why. Our society seems to possess a collective feeling of guilt and wish to unburden itself – or maybe it’s just a need to be recognised and noticed in public, to gain fame or notoriety. I won’t try to come to any conclusions about this, but it does suggest to me that what we are dealing with in The Failure Project actually has some direct relevance to modern life and our ways of interacting with each other. Hmmm…maybe we should move The Failure Project into more of a multi-media direction…

Where I think The Failure Project differs from these other examples, I think, is that it doesn’t offer the comfort blanket of anonymity to the performers participating, which makes it potentially a more confrontational and difficult experience. The ‘confessions’ or nuggets of personal information offered to the reader in Twitter or the ’25 things…’ post on Facebook, in which you almost always know the identity of the writer, almost always fit under the ‘quirky’ category – cute little snippets designed to remind the reader just how wacky/funny/cute/interesting etc. the writer is. The only times in which true exposure occurs, in the revelation of information that is truly personal and difficult to reveal (for whatever reason) is when this comfort blanket is offered. Postcript was a book and website and ‘ongoing community art project’ I came across a couple of years ago; anonymous people offer up their deepest, darkest confessions on postcards and send them in…and that’s it. We don’t know which are really true, and which are false, but some seem so specific it is impossible to imagine they were the product of someone’s imagination (one recent example: “I work in healthcare, and I love when I see a man’s penis on an x-ray”. It’s fascinating and uncomfortable to read through these confessions, which are funny, upsetting and shocking, and although you can’t relate to all of them you do find yourself thinking about your own failings, foibles, dirty little secrets. The confessions read aloud to the audience in the six-hour piece Speak Bitterness are always preceded by the pronoun “we”, effectively absolving any particular person from direct responsibility: “We thought that Black Watch was a musical…We lived our lives in front of the webcam…We made our lovers weep and then said ‘oh, you’re so beautiful when you cry’”. It is this that makes Speak Bitterness so powerful; it manages to implicate everyone, by implicating nobody directly at all.

Both these examples, through the honesty that anonymity allows and the anonymity itself, achieve a connection with the spectator that causes them to reflect upon their own lives. What I am trying, I think, is more difficult. The spectator gets to know each performer as a real person, witnessing their failures and confessions as they happen. It is so personal as to be confrontational: “here, this is me, here are my failures, my weaknesses, unvarnished, what do you have to say about it?” And as such, it thrusts upon the spectator not only their own complicity in the events they are watching (I’ve spoken about this loads before, so won’t go into it again) but makes their own resulting personal reflection less stable, less comfortable, as a result, constantly bombarded as they are with confessions that are real and truly personal, coming from ‘I’ as well as ‘we’, and actions performed in the present that are doomed to become future confessions. I hope to make it multi-layered experience, an exchange between spectator and performer, performer and spectator (again, something I have spoken of before).

Maybe I’m punching above my weight – the previous Failure Project did explore these ideas but did not go all the way, was never truly committed to them. Now that I am working with performers I have a previous knowledge of and am close to, we can perhaps get down to the really difficult stuff sooner. It won’t be easy though. I’ll let you know how the first rehearsal goes. I think I’m losing the thread of my argument now – I should really write my blog posts earlier in the day and not when I’m tired and about to sleep.