Translations

So, for the interim show I presented the video of my lecture on pub games on a desk in the triangle space. There was one chair and no headphones, which meant that only the person in the chair, close to the speakers could hear it.
I wouldn’t say I was overly happy with my piece for interim in comparison to my other work, but as an exercise into understand my practice it did open up a number of ideas. My main concern with this piece was that it was just a bit boring. Normally my work has an element of humour in it, and a certain light-heartedness, but due to the nature of this performance it didn’t have this. I also felt that It didn’t work in the gallery setting, as even the person sitting in the chair couldn’t hear it, due to the surrounding noise at the private view.
However I did think that some things worked, one being the performance itself. The show that I made this work for was called translations, and focused on changing your practice slightly. The way I changed mine was to perform myself in a participant based event. I felt the event itself worked, and if I could go back and change it I would just do the performance, and not show the video of it in the gallery space. The piece showed me the value of the original performance, and from this I was able to reconsider the way that I perform. Whether the performance itself should stand-alone or if it needs to be couple with the video achieve. This idea leads onto my thesis, where I am looking at whether performance and the achieve can, or must, go hand in hand. It also made me think about the way that I can present the research for my work as a viable part of the work itself. Although it may not seem it, there is a lot of research that go into my work, which I often discard and don’t show; it is just there to inform me. But this piece actively uses this research, and is something that I will be developing in the future.
Lastly this piece looked at two things I don’t often do or address in my work, one was to perform myself instead of hiring actor, which is something I’m still not overly comfortable with, not due to feeling unconfident, but feeling a lack of control over the performance. It is however something I will experiment with further. The second is doing a participant based event with member of the public, which is something I don’t do, because, again, I don’t feel I can maintain the right level of control over the performance. However in this situation (the lecture theatre) I felt I could assert control over the proceedings, and if I was to do a participant based event again I would be interested in doing it in this type of institutional, control environment, where I can take on a role as leader.
Below are some photos of my piece in the interim show, and some of the private view…

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So we’ve been asked to give presentations in seminar as groups on how each of our works link…I’ve been grouped with the lovely Jess Fisher and Jeewoo Chang…which I very happy with because I really like both their practices…so it makes it a bit easier…after a meeting talking about how are work linked we came to a standstill. The most obvious way our work links is that we all use humour, but the problem is we all use humour in such different ways. So we talked about various other ideas, before deciding that we all do performance in a rather authoritative way, so this is an element we should present. This is in the sense that we all maintain a lot of control over our performances, and don’t tend to leave things to chance…so we came up with the idea of doing manuals, to instruct the seminar in how to construct our work and make their own version of it.
I will be making an ‘IKEA’ style flat pack instruction kit, instructing the user on how to put together the set pieces for a performance, and then instructing them on what game to play in this created environment. The game I have chosen is ‘sleeping lion’, where one person is hunter and the rest are lions. The lions have to lye on the floor and pretend to sleep and the hunter has to try and make them move without touching them. The set pieces I have design are a giraffe and a small version of ‘pride rock’ from ‘the lion king’. All they will have to do is attach the stands to them.
The presentation went well. My participants managed to put together the set, with only a little bit of my interference. Then our seminar tutor, Gill, encourage the whole seminar to play the game, with me as hunter…which I wasn’t very comfortable with, as I don’t like performing myself, but it was good fun anyway…we talked about it a bit after, and I talked about how the manual was in essence me, as they took the role we would take in a performance (i.e as more of a director than performer). But I also talked about how I didn’t like the lack of control giving power over to a manual gave me. We also decided that talking about the presentation was counter productive, as everyone got an understanding of our work but ‘making it’, which is what we wanted, so task completed.