Meeting my theapist

So, today I met with Alyson Henty, who has kindly volunteered to help me in my performance, and take the role of the psychotherapist. As I have said it is important that the performer taking this role is an actual psychotherapist. Alyson is one of three director of East Kent based company ‘Together in Communication’. ‘Together in Communictaion’ (TIC) is a not for profit company who work in schools in the Medway area to provide counselling and support for children and families, as well as working on a number of other projects in the area, such as a program of counselling session with overweight people called ‘tipping the balance’. The company was established in 2005, and since then it has gained a great deal of respect and funding in the local area, as well as receiving lottery grants. On there website (http://ticcic.co.uk/AllAboutUs.html) they say they’re aims are to work for ‘social benefit and improvement, (to) work collaboratively helping develop healthily, real and meaningful relationships that are based on respect, honesty, integrity and mutual trust.’ In their own words there vision is to ‘give people the opportunity to understand and improve relationships in a peaceful, powerful and trusting community, by using innovative, retainable and self sustainable methodologies.’ Through her work with TIC and her own private practice Alyson has a great deal of experience working with both adults and children. I will also be working with another of TIC’s directors, Sue, who also has a great wealth of experience working with children and adults, through TIC and her private practice in west Kent. Having a wealth of experience at my disposal in both Alyson and Sue I feel safe that my performance will run smoothly, and be informed by their knowledge around this area of psychotherapy.
This was my first meeting with Alyson regarding the performance, but I had discussed it previously via e.mail. It was good to meet face to face, because we were able to talk about the technicalities of the performance and how we might structure it. We decided that we were going to do three 30-minute sessions, one in a direct style and one indirect. The direct style is where the psychotherapist guide the client in what they are doing, for example they might say, ‘why don’t you paint a picture of what you think a family looks like…’, indirect is where they just let the client do what they like and then comment on it, for example they might say, ‘I see you are playing with that soft toy, do you like the soft toy…’. The last session we will decide on the day which style is working best for the performance, and do it in that style. We discussed the role that Alyson is going to take, and how to act. We also settled on a date for the performance, which will be the 13th of May.
I am really happy with how this meeting went. Alyson really seemed to understand where I was coming from and what I wanted to do, and was very happy to help. I’m confident in her as my psychotherapist role.

Plans

so, for my degree show performance I am planning on building the set so that I can film in exactly the same set as I present the work in, so there is a continuity between the two pieces. These are the plans for the set…

Catalogue photo

So, its time to take my catalogue photo for degree show. I have decided that I am going to dress as a child and sit under the lamp, (which is the first part of the performance set that I have made). The thinking behind this is that it combines the two most obvious elements of my work, the performance as children, and the 2D MDF cut out set pieces. It will also make my catalogue entry instantly recognisable to my work in the show. It took a long time to decide how the picture was going to be taken and what the set up would look like. But with the help of the lovely Natalie Bays, who took the photo, we came up with some really good shots. The set up I envisaged was a front on photo of my sitting at the base of the lamp to the left, but the one I decided to go for was actually one where Natalie was experimenting with the angle of the picture, and not something I had considered, but that looked really good in the end. I also experimented with expression during these photos, and decided to go for a rather perplexed, worried look, as I thought this tallied quite well with the confusion of reality and fantasy in the piece.

Toward the degree show

So, I’ve been back and forth with the plans for my degree show…my original idea was to put on a production of ‘the rocky horror picture show’ using students from the university with a variety of talent levels as performers. I’m interested in the nature of role-play in amateur dramatic and to a wider extent the show itself. The idea of the amateur dramatics societies is something that interests me a great deal. It is the community that is created by these groups that interests me. The fact that acting is not these people’s careers and therefore they do it to intersect their everyday life, to add fantasy and role-play into there lives…I think maybe I have to much of a ‘Stephen Poliakoff’ view of the amateur dramatics society, if that make sense…I mean by this that in my head I think of ‘normal’ people with ‘normal’ lives…(meaning boring life)…doing something to brighten their lives, something small, and perhaps mundane that is in fact beautiful and life affirming…there is a beautiful scene in ‘Gideon’s Daughter’, where Stella takes Gideon to a church in the middle of some industrial part of London to hear the choir. The choir is full of normal people, fat, thin, short, tall, etc, one is gorging on a sandwich, others are chatting, it emphasises the normality of life…but when they sing it is the most beautiful sound…glorious, in a much better sense than a hyped up PR event (which is what the film focuses on) it is beautiful because it is just normal people who have a quietly beautiful talent…and I think this is what I think of when I am thinking of the concept of amateur dramatic society and the people within them…so after all this analysis I realised that I didn’t have enough time to explore this concept in depth, so it is something that is on the back burner until after degree show.
Instead for degree show I am revisiting an idea that I was working earlier in the term. I am going to be conducting a performance where a performer goes into a room and acts like a child. There will also be a trained psychotherapist in the room, who will do a child based psychotherapy session with them, the whole time treating them as if they are truly children. The room will consist of a sofa in a bright base colour, various children’s toys on the floor, and a number of other items of furniture, but these will be set piece, 2D MDF cut outs. The performer must act true to being a child, they must believe they are a child, the psychotherapist, similarly must believe that the performer is a child, and they are doing child based psychotherapy, the actor must throw themselves into the roles. One of the ideas of this performance is to deconstruct a reality within a fantasy, using realistic methods, which in essence become a fantasy due to the fantastical nature of the situation. It blurs the lines between reality and fantasy. As a sub-theme of this it is about the idea of childhood that the performer invents, and how this can be examined and analysed through real processes. As a hypothesis I would propose that the performers will draw upon memories of their own childhood in order to act as a child and therefore there will be elements of this performance that look at memory, and how we view our childhood.

‘I’m the teacher now…’

So, I have chosen to exhibit the video of the A124 School within an exhibition based around the ideas that informed the performance.
The video of the performance run along side four other videos. Three of another performance I did on Wednesday of this week, where I talked about when I was at school, one is a very factual video on the details of my secondary school, one is about memories from when I was at school and one is just a video of me staring at the camera whilst the hymn ‘Jerusalem’ plays. In each of these videos I am sitting at the teachers desk from the ‘A124 School’ performance dressed in my old school blazer and tie. These videos are shown in the store cupboard of the classroom. The store cupboard is not empty, it has a pile of chairs, an old plinth, a stool, some old lockers, a notice board by the door with teacher notices, and behind this notice board a lot of store room type junk. The TV showing the memories of school is on the old lockers, the TV showing the video of school facts is on the old plinth, which is closer to the door and the TV showing me staring at the camera, and ‘Jerusalem’ playing is under the stack of chairs nearest the door. The volume on the video of ‘Jerusalem’ is loudest so it blocks out the sound of the other two TV’s, which are already playing over each other. The only way you can hear these two TV’s is to put your ear right up to the speaker. The fourth video is a clip from ‘youtube’ of a film someone made of my school in 1998. This plays on a laptop on the teacher’s desk in the classroom. There is no sound on this video. The video of the performance plays on the TV on the windowsill, that was present throughout the performance. You can hear the sound through headphones.
The classroom is exactly the same as it was throughout the performance, however, the boards that were empty through the performance, now have the work of the ‘students’ on them.
This exhibition is not about critiquing the educational system; it is not about education at all. It is about memories of part of everyone’s childhood, memories of an institution that dominates 14 years of our lives. The performance of ‘A124 School’ focuses more on a childhood desire I had to be the teacher, mainly so that I could write on the whiteboard. Coupled with the exhibition, these two things come together and it focuses, as a whole, on childhood desire, memory and the fact that none of this matter now, because now as adults we are in the position to do what we want. None of the memories, whether good or bad, of our school days matter now, because now, I can be the teacher.
I also used this performance and exhibition to experiment with performance and exhibition techniques in light of the approaching degree show. There was one main thing I wanted to experiment with performance wise, and this was whether I should perform myself. It turns out no, I don’t feel comfortable enough performing myself, not because I’m not confident in my own performance, but because I don’t feel I can get the same level of control over the performance as I can standing on the outside, directing the performers. Exhibition wise, I like the site specific-ness of the video instillation, and this is something that I will certainly use in the future, but not something I feel is completely necessary. I also like what was going on in the store cupboard with the three videos playing over each other. It is something I did before in ‘the good, the bad and the Chelsea’ exhibition and I will be thinking about this, perhaps not for degree, but certainly for other projects I am working on. This week has certainly made things clearer, and I’m very pleased with the performance and exhibition…