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.

‘The Good, the Bad, and the Chelsea’

So, I have finally reached the point where I feel I can exhibit the work that I produced in May. Back in may I did a performance based on the children’s game Cowboys and Indians. It took place on the square of grass in the centre of Chelsea parade ground and I used six performers, three of whom where given ‘cowboy’ roles, and three of whom were given ‘Indian’ roles. The performance lasted 10 minutes, and was filmed on four cameras, each one at a different side of the square. The performers were told three rules. One, that they can shout ‘NAME your dead’ at someone to shot them. Two, that if they heard someone say ‘THEIR NAME your dead’ then they had to lye on the ground and count to ten before getting up again and continuing to play. And three, that one performer was ‘Chief’ of the Indians and one performer was ‘Sheriff’ of the cowboys, they were not told that these two were in charge of either group though. The reasoning for the third rule was to see if, having been given these roles, these people took charge. This didn’t happen.
I had made a number of set pieces for the performance to take part around. These were two explosions, two trees, four cacti and a tepee.
I couldn’t exhibit the videos in the exact place that it took place as it took place outside. So to exhibit it I moved the set piece inside. However I feel just resetting up the ‘stage’ in which the performance took place inside would be pointless. So instead I domesticated the ‘stage’. If the ‘stage’ is moved inside I must make the ‘stage’ environment suitable for an interior space. The cacti have been turned into the legs of a coffee table, the two tree have been joined together to make a free standing coat stand and the explosions make the front and back of a cupboard.
I struggled for a long time on how to exhibit these videos. The original thought was to present them as projections in a blank, four walled space. Each projection on a different wall, and all in time, so one by one the video came on and played showing each angle of the performance, then turning off one by one. However the more I thought about this, the more it seemed like trying to recreate the performance, instead of seeing the videos in there own merit. So instead I decided on this domestic environment. However I also decided against the idea of showing them in sequence, as again this didn’t feel like it added anything to the original performance, and if this exhibition is not going to add anything to the performance in May then what is the point of exhibiting. So in the end each video was played at random at differing levels of sound, so no sound could be heard completely, but there was definitely sound of some sort. This worked rather well in the end too, as it created a sound not dissimilar to a school playground, which evoked the memories that this game should provoke.
So the exhibition consists of the furniture made from the set pieces four televisions, a red sofa, and a coffee table book, as a catalogue of the original performance.