On Lunch Break

We decided to rehearse another one of our five stations today and we decided on our “Lunch” station. Just eating and drinking for an hour was actually more difficult than we thought as concentrating on saving enough soup and water to last for an hour turned out to be quite hard. However, we have managed to get all the materials we needed for this station and are using hold-up camping tables for portability so it’ll be easier to get it to our site and set up when we’re there.

Our general thoughts consisted of our potential problems consisted of making sure it lasted an hour as well as packing it up to transition to the next station. We got around this by using the washing the plates bowl and putting the glasses and plates in there and that way we also set up for the next station potentially without going back to the alcove at out site.

We got around the problem of it lasting by decided that it would be our “break” in the performance and decided to act more naturistically than the repetition of other stations and this would get around this problem, whilst also varying our stations and making the performance more interesting to watch.

Rehearsing Lunch Station Rehearsing Lunch Station

Hanging About

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.