Georgia Starr

So, I had a tutorial with Georgia Starr, literally 30 minutes before I was filming my degree show performance, and on a very busy day, but I’ve wanted a tutorial with Georgia since first year, so I was determined not to cancel it, even though I was probably a bit out of it.
We talked about the upcoming filming, and what I wanted to get out of it and what themes I was exploring.
Georgia told me about a new project that Gillian Wearing has just finished called ‘Self Made’, where she worked with volunteers and psychoanalysis to make a film. ( http://selfmade.org.uk/about/ )The films explored issues that the volunteers had, from suicide to alcohol abuse. After the tutorial I looked into this and was reading about how she advertised for people to either work on their own experience or act as a character. This links into a dilemma I have had with this performance, regarding how I want the performers to act. I was determined not to use the usual students that I use in my performances, but instead to hire actors. I felt that students would know to much about my work, and this would influence their performance, and make it too unreal. I want the performers to draw on their own experiences of being children, but not too much, because I feel there is too much of an ethical issue here. The ethics of this performance has been an issue for me. If I am to ask performer to draw on there own childhood to act the role of a child in a psychotherapy session, then what’s to say that the session wouldn’t open up underlying issues in there lives. Normally sessions like this would be 10 sessions long and 45minute each, where these issues can be explored. However in this case it will be a one off, 20-minute performance. Whilst I want the actors to draw upon there own experience, I don’t want to open up old issues, or expose anything that would be exposed in a ‘real’ psychotherapy session. Georgia told me about another Gillian Wearing performance where she gave real alcoholics free beer and told them to dance in front of a white screen whilst she filmed them. Whilst there are obvious ethical issues here, they are also consenting adults, who where being paid, so is this wrong or is it justified? It reminded me of a Dave Beech seminar I went to earlier in the year, where he was discussing ethics and participation. I got annoyed, because a lot of people there seemed to view artists’ as some sort of care worker, who’s role was to come into a community and solve all the problems there, and be connected to that community for life. I don’t see why an artist role is this steeped in responsibility to the participant. A musician who does a concert in a poor area, isn’t then expected to provide aftercare to anyone who might have been affected by it. But then again I think that the piece by Santiago Sierra, where he tattooed the backs of the drug addicts, was abusive towards a vulnerable group. Is there a difference between this piece and the Gillian wearing piece with drunks?
I think the difference may be that the Sierra piece is more permanent, and takes advantage of a group is a harmful way, whereas in Wearing piece it is just exaggerating a problem that already exists. But this has caused lots of questions. Because I am now using friends, who are students at Chelsea, in my film, it means that I have more of a responsibility towards their well being afterwards, and therefore I tried to make sure that they acted as children, drawing from what they remember of as being a child, but didn’t draw on actual experiences that they had. They created a character, but worked from there own memories to create this character. I wanted it to be both manufactured and organic at the same time, which is a big, and oxymoronic, ask, but will hopeful mean that my piece will work out how I want it. I think that this ambiguity will link smoothly with the contradiction of reality and fantasy that my film and following installation focuses on.
So, I’ve booked a ticket to go and see the Gillian wearing film on the 31st June.
We also talked about the link between this work and art therapy. I talked about how when I started on foundation I was interested into going into art therapy and wasn’t thinking of doing a fine art BA, but an art therapy diploma instead. But I discovered that I wasn’t as much interested in art therapy itself, but rather therapy as a theme, or rather the institution of therapy as a means of challenging the ways people live. Watching Alyson (the psychotherapist in my performance) doing a play therapy session with the actors, made me think about the similarity between our practices. The way that Alyson plays and talks to the client, but is always in control of the situation, manipulating it in order to manipulate certain aspects links to the controlling aspect of my performance, and the way this control draws out the theme I am exploring. Through this technique she can highlight and cordon off a particular problem areas of the clients persona.
This tutorial with Georgia made me think about the techniques I am using in this performance. It made me consider why I thought it was so important to use actors as appose to students or volunteers. And I think it was all down to an expectation that the actor would be more professional, that they would play down the character, instead of focusing on trait that they thought to be particularly childish and playing these up. It turned out that I just wanted someone with the right personality to act, they had to be quietly forceful with there character, whilst exerting a subtly toward the interplay of there adult reality and their childhood fantasy. What I needed to do was to audition actors. However as luck would have it, three of the most brilliant people volunteered to actor for me and I couldn’t have been happier with how it went. It turned out that the importance of actors who knew nothing about my work, as I discussed with Georgia, was not as important as I thought. And I think my insistence of this stemmed more from a fear that the performance wouldn’t happen as I wanted and an attempt to control it. I learnt from this that I can’t always control and that sometime letting things run the way fate (or just a crazily random sequence of events) intended makes them turn out for the better.