Hanging About

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Testing out performances is clearly important for any piece of theatre but for our site specific piece, I don’t think we realised just how crucial it would be until we actually tried it in the site. We decided to have a trial run of one of our five stations (as the five stations would represent what we use water for and our reliance on structures such as the water tower), and the station we chose was washing clothes. For our performance we are doing a piece of repetitive, performative theatre so for this station, Jamie will be washing the clothes in a particular way and I will be getting them dirty again in a series of repetitive actions i.e. putting the shirt on right arm first each time then running to the hill, getting into the lying down position before rolling down the hill and repeating this three times before taking the shirt off and starting again and this will last an hour. After

“No repetition is exactly the same as the action as it copies – if only by the fact of it being a repetition rather than an initial act, or of being the third repetition rather than the second.” (Howell, 1999)

The human element of repetition and incosistancies is something I find particularly interesting and will be inevitably apparant in my performance. Even the repetitive actions we do every day (dirtying clothes and then cleaning them again) has a ritualistic element towards it. The inconcistancies occur each time we perform the action but the basic action remains the same. With our theme of water, we will explore and perform a repetitive, performative piece that hopefully an audience will find interesting to watch.

Rehearsing Site Specific

Howell, A. 1999. The Analysis of Performance Art: A Guide to Its Theory and Practice. Routledge. p.79

Crowe, S. 2015. Rehearsing Site Specific Performance. Wickham Gardens. Lincoln. England.

 

16. Conversations

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Using the advice from Rachel after our first run-through, we decided to re-write the audio script to have a conversational tone. Whilst we had previously written what we planned to say on paper and read it out for recording, this time we did not want it to sound too scripted. Thus, we recorded our entire conversation of our meeting as we went through every part of the audio saying ideas for what should be said. This naturally allowed for the words to sound friendly and relaxed, and helped us to experience what our audience would hear from our idea suggestions. After recording our conversation, we each went away and wrote up sections of the audio we now had. An example of the transcript I made is here:

“Why don’t we move on from this space to the next part of our journey, and press play on audio 2. (Audio 2) Lets turn around to face the picnic blanket where we started off our journey. If you look to your left there’s a black railing, why don’t we follow it around the corner of the Cathedral and see where it takes us? Keep an eye out for portals to Narnia and little pixie huts. Have you found what you were looking for? I’ve come this way before, if I remember right there’s a statue on the left of a man with his dog. Why don’t we go and find it? Why don’t you have a break from me for a while, and press pause whilst you make your way over to the statue.”

Once we have the entirety of the new audio script, we plan to record it again and do another run-through with the new audio, the planned moments and “guinea-pig” audience members.

In thinking of how to make our audio conversational, we all thought of the “Every day moments” podcasts that we had listened to in class. The podcasts were created by individual artists as audio pieces to listen to in particular moments and settings in the day. I went away and listened to two of them, one by Adrian Howels and one by Lemm Sissay, for inspiration. The first podcast, found here by Adrian Howels, is “designed to be listened to in the early hours of the morning, in bed with a hot drink”. (Howell, 2011) One aspect I found similar to what we wanted to use in our audio was the use of background noise, whether it be the noise of static, the television, a slurp of drink or a yawn. We also want to use sounds in our audio, such as the sound of birds or wedding bells, and hearing our idea used likewise has shown how effective they can be in enhancing an emotion or thought for the audience. The second podcast, Late Night Rain, found here by Lemm Sissay, is “designed to be listened to exactly then – late at night”. (Sissay, 2011) The tone of the voice in this audio is how I think we should aim to sound in our piece: talkative and fouced on the listener. The language used was simple and yet effective in portraying what they wanted to to the listener, which is what we also want to do. Listening to these podcasts was an effective way of understanding and hearing how our audience can experience our audio, by making myself an audience member to a different audio piece.

Howels, A. (2011) Everyday Moments 11: audio drama for private performance. The Guardian. [online] Available from http://www.theguardian.com/culture/audio/2011/nov/21/everyday-moments-podcast-adrian-howells [Accessed 24 April 2015].

Sissay, L. (2011) Everyday Moments 10: audio drama for private performance. The Guardian. [online] Available from http://www.theguardian.com/culture/audio/2011/oct/21/everyday-moments-podcast-lemn-sissay [Accessed 24 April 2015].

Its A Time Capsule

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One space may contain many different memories however who truly knows the depths of these memories and the history behind them .

We think about what we are doing now, and what we may have been doing in that place at a different time, or even somebody we know, what they may have done? Its a capsule of time. Every memory is overlapped by another, so what if you can walk across them all while being introduced to different aspects of each of them.

Audio walks can link many different paths, they may also make you think about the surrounding area in various ways however the crossing of different sounds through centuries, the idea behind having cars crossing yet then hearing a horse and carriage for the different means of travel. The bombs and shouting from battles going on to the messages given from those who used to travel across such an area of land. Each space has a way of remembering these moments through time.

Richard Long (Jackson, S) is a creative artist who looks at a landscape and takes art to a different level, he creates art by walking through landscapes, as well as photographing sculptures which are made along the walks. He then turns walks into text works. Each frame of art is transitioned into something else to create a different form, this style of art is extremely useful in creating a time capsule of events as if means you can create different artistic elements for different time periods on each landscape. Therefore a walk, sculpture and photographs could all lay upon one site yet they my all be showing different memories and time periods, meaning the audience has to think about different times and elements yet still in the same site.

Jackson, S. Richard Long. [online] Available from: http://www.richardlong.org/index.html [Accessed 23 April 2015].

Prepping a lot of Salt Dough

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So what does plain flour+ salt + vegetable oil+ water equals?

Salt dough

We had to quite a lot of it, we made about 190 amounts of these…. https://flic.kr/p/rYC7Ha .

We found out that two bags of salt and flour wasn’t going to cut it, so we had to go back to the shops and have a quick calculation what will make enough models for our piece. We came up with this:

  • 12 bags salt
  • 6 bags plain flour
  • 2 bottles of vegetable oil

And three rolls of cling film to keep the dough fresh.

https://flic.kr/p/rjgADz

Overall it cost £12.

We did have some difficulty with some of the batches… some were too oily or to sloppy or even to dry! We soon sorted it out with trial and error with having 190 in 4 hours.

https://flic.kr/p/rYC3YM

I did have some problems making the salt dough as we were working with to ingredients that are very dry, so someone who has eczema it didn’t take long for my hands to crack and feel sore, so I had to stop and have another job and wrap the salt dough in cling film. The way I will resolve this problem for next time will be wearing gloves.

So for next time we will be buying, probably a little more than we did for the rehearsal so we can have about 400 worth or so. I will be wearing gloves and we will have more a sustain batch of salt dough from the recipe.

Next blog will be talking and evaluating on the rehearsal and what we learnt from the experience…

Version 1

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With the rough audio done we decided to book a meeting with our tutor Rachael and give it a test run with her and get feedback on anything we needed to improve. After she completed our route with the audio she met back with us to give us her opinion on it and tell us any changes we could make to improve it. She loved the end moment which we very pleased with as this was our biggest challenge. Rachael also pointed out to us that even though she like the walk it was too short and she was standing at the Cathedral for too long and to maybe consider add things into our audio that would make people stop to extend the time they spend on the walk to allow them to end up at the cathedral at the right time. Finally she told us to add things such to build up to the final moment and to think about why we started at Newport arch and finished at Exchequer gate and find the significance in that in relation to our audio walk.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXUbt03RO0Q&feature=youtu.be