22 February 2012
Lecture:
Today we started off the lesson by looking at any questions about the creation of our solo pieces.
Hall, E from last weeks reading looks at the formal, informal and technical learning and how we can create patterns in behavior.
Identity is constructed through society. Therefore, we can use this module to deconstruct the identity that we see through the eyes of the society.
Things to look at for your performance:
What concept do you want to explore for your solo performance and through that concept the format will emerge?
No matter what you articulate you will still be caught in the political of identity. This is because the politics of the world effect almost every aspect of out lives and in one way or another we are influenced by what society thinks or what is morally right or wrong within the eyes of the society.
The same can be said about instincts because can we really say that when we use our instincts it is our decision or have we been conditioned by society and the things we observe throughout our lives that make up our instincts and not necessarily our own behavior! If we look at it that way we behave and present ourselves has been drummed into us since we were little and so therefore it is apart of us to act that way naturally because that is what is excepted of us.
How We will be accessed? To get a 70% or distinction:
How much research is going into your solo piece?
What kind of archive have you collected such as pictures and text?
What solo artist are you exploring or drawing inspiration from?
We will be having one to one tutorials with the lecturers to look at the concept that we have chosen and how you are using gestures and movement within the piece.
We will also have a peer feedback in order for us to get a chance to show our work to the others and get feedback and help in fine tuning or looking more into certain aspects of the piece and maybe help guide us into the right direction as to making the piece clearer.
The performance does not have to linear and is allowed to be fractured such as in exploring memory and can also cross between many disciplines and forms.
We will need to put together our own program with title and a brief description of the performance.
We were given an example of a solo piece by Zena Edwards, who is a poetic artist. She uses movement, poetry and global influences as a jump-off her words.
Zena Edwards is a London-based performance poet, writer and musician. Her vibrant poetry is inspired by her experiences of travel, particularly through Africa, as well as traditional African music and song. She often accompanies her work with mbira, kalimba and marimba (thumb pianos).'She defines the fusion of poetry and music by including traditional African-instrumentation (the Kalimba and Kora) and new technology, to create her own sound tracks for her poems and stories, producing a body of work that reaches culturally and generationally diverse audiences on an international level. She fuses Jazzy Hip-Hop grooves, heavily influenced by her world music collaborations, with South African musicians including Pops Mohamed, one of her most important mentors.' (2011: http://literature.britishcouncil.org/zena-edwards)
'Zena Edwards has been involved in performance for 14 years – as a vocalist, poet and stage-manager after graduating from Middlesex University.'
Group Exercise:
In pairs share your ideas of a concept you have chosen for you performance so far, looking at what research and themes you have so far.
Because I am thinking of maybe looking at alter-egos. 'We all have alter-egos and show them differently like when with friends, family or at work. We always act as someone else. This is because of how we are meant to act in certain situations. When you go for a job interview or casting you are meant to act professional whereas when you with your friends you will act the way they act. For my piece I am looking at maybe playing with different persona's. For me my alter-ego is the opposite of me and she is someone who will do anything and not care what people thinks of her. She loves danger and is not afraid to take risks. During my discussion in class in the pairs, I was told to maybe play with moods, because we always feels differently when we are happy or sad or angry. So while using the free-writing as a tool try and write down things when I am in those different moods and see what I get out of it.
Out of the three readings from last week look at 3 claims and 3 counter-claims: Also look at the way the writers talk about the space in which work is produced:
We are conditioned to act a certain way and we also tend to learn through observations from when we are young. We watch the way our parents act and imitate them and also it is the way we are brought up and what we are taught when we are growing up that influences the way we see certain things. Not everyone see or agrees with certain things depending on where they were brought up or how they were brought up because we were all brought up with different values and beliefs.
When doing our performance we should look at the similarities and differences between the concept we choose. So basically try to see the ides from both sides.
Aernout Mik plays with social contexts by placing his performances in certain ways and letting the audience find their own meaning within what he is doing and as before this depends entirely on how they were brought up. As his performances don't have sound or dialogue it is easier for the audiences to see what is happening and come to their own conclusion of what they see. Mik takes the concept of a situation and shows both sides of a story.
Creative Exercise: Envelope Exchange:
We each had to bring an envelope with a picture, a text and an object but it had to be something that was inspirational. We were then out into pairs and each pair given an envelope from someone else.
For each of the items in the envelope we had to find a concept and discuss in our pairs how we can use the items to make a solo piece.
In my envelope there are a picture of a girl who had multiple tattoos on her legs, a Lauren Hill CD and a poem on life being a masterpiece. The concept I picked out was life's journey and that by using the words from the poem and the girls tattoos show a journey through life from the hard times and the happy times and how a combination of those two and the choices we make we can find a recipe to make a masterpiece in our lives.
Next on out own we had to write or perform a mini response to what we had in the envelope.
I chose to write a bit of text as a respnse:
Life comes in many forms; People choose their masterpieces in different ways: through sharing a bit of their world through songs, other through art. Journey's traveled and choices made. In the end we find the solution. We have to face the good with the bad and the beauty with the ugly. Just like a two-sided coin, you cannot have one without the other.
Afternoon Workshop:
We started off the workshop with a warm-up of walking through the space and then all walking into the middle of the circle. We were told that when we walk into the circle we shouldn't show tension but walk naturally even if you bump or bounce one another. Next we did a balancing exercise were we had to hold each other by the wrist and by sharing our weight evenly go down and back up. To get us focused and working as a group we had to choose one person to lead and we all have to follow them but not looking at them and someone else had to choose who we we were following.
Continuing from the morning exercise with the envelops we had to do back and practice a small performance and then share with the group and get some feedback. Then we went into groups of threes and re-did our piece and we had to give each other feedback as to how it went, what to change or to try it differently and then once again re-group and share with everyone.
I know that it is a task that is mean't to help us with our solo piece but I felt that it wasn't helping us because we are working on other concepts besides our own. It is good to be able to get an example as to how to do our own piece but at the same time I think that it would be more worth it if we focused on our own concepts we want for our solo and work on that and use that time to then get some feedback from the rest, which would be more beneficial.
Reading One:
Heddon, D. (2006) 'Beyond the Self: Autobiography as Dialogue.' Wallace, C. Monologues: Theater, Performance, Subjectivity. Prague: Litteria Pragensia
Women performers are still looked down upon as being something that has less authority and are dismissed as silly and less important.
Autobiography that is less social is considered more as a female genre.
Although autobiographical performances are about an individual, there is still a sense of collaboration within the development process because the performer has to consider the audience reactions to the material and try to remember events with other people.
In Autobiographical performances we portray our 'self' as many different characters both from past, present and future as well as the 'self' that we don't let anyone else see.
Autobiographical performances do not just relate to the self - but the problems and concepts used are universal and can relate to many culturally, historically and politically regardless of language.
Performances tend to be made or scripted with a particular audience in mind so that the audience will be able to compare the performance to their own life.
The explicit use of personal experience in performance, drawn upon as a material resource and regarded as a dramaturgical point of focus, can be traced to the first wave of feminist movement where the 'personal' was understood also as 'the political.' (157)
Autobiographical performance was, from the outset, political in its aspirations and the roll-call of performers who explicitly draw on their own life-experiences underlines the continuity of this fact, from Rachel Rosenthal's 'autobiographical' or 'autoethnographic' performances, to Tim Miller's persistent demand for equal rights for gay men and lesbians in the USA, to Bobby Baker's illuminating performances representing the struggle of simultaneously being a wife, mother, artist or, more recently, her challenge to the cultural taboo surrounding mental health, to Joey Hateley's discourse of living beyond the fixed binaries of sex and gender. (158)
Solo performance is, of course a field rife with self-indulgence and incipient monumental egotism. (159)
As Gammel notes, when personal experiences are expressed via the female voice, they are perceived as being informal and lacking in authority, belonging to the realm of parole rather than the more abstract langue, and as such as dismissed as being of less concern. (160)
Autobiographical performances are rarely about the (singular) self. (161)
In solo autobiographical performance, the performing subject and the subject of performance are typically one and the same. (161)
It is, however, more accurate perhaps to say that selves are inevitably in dialogue with selves, because in performance of autobiographical there is the self who performs, and the self who is performed; there is also the self who lives beyond the performance-the self that we, the spectators, do not witness. (162)
Dialoguing with various 'selves,' autobiographical performance continue to be a mode of consciousness-raising for the performer as much as for the spectator. What also needs to be recognized in the staging of the 'autobiographical' performance is that the 'self' is inseparable from 'others'; psychoanalytically/structurally, the self is dependent on the other to have self-definition.(163)
There is no singular or monolithic culture that inscribes a single interpretation to any event, but rather many possible cultural locations and readings (variously dominant and subordinated.) (165)
The inevitable and continual interactions between languages propose that all are capable of being influential and of being influenced. Performer Denise Uyehara recognizes this Utopian imperative:
Finally, and most importantly, performance is trans-formative. It provides new ways of expressing or imaging a culture, situation or struggle. It challenges us to imagine a new world in which we live.Stories are powerful in that they are concerned with a 'literary and political re-shaping of language and thus consciousness.' (166-167)
'The goal of autobiographical work should not be to tell stories about yourself but, instead, to use the details of your own life to illustrate or explore something more universal. (170)
Autobiographical performances are very deliberately addressed to, and may variously hope to raise consciousness and educate, politicize, incite, anger, move, and inspire. (171)
Geographer Doreen Massey, proposes that we imagine space 'as a simultaneity of stories-so-far.' (179)
Reading Two:
Sontag, S. (2009) Where the Stress Falls. Penguin Classics
This reading looks at the work of Child's and the difference in method and techniques to Cunningham.
Even though in a dance piece there are many dancers, a dancer can still have a solo or be called a soloist because within the piece there is likely to be a part for the main dancer to perform alone.
Even if they are performing someone else's method it is still regarded a solo in that the dancer brings their own flair and technique to the dance.
This reading also looks at the different ways of making a performance such as the example of Child's dancing on the street and yet her voice was played to the audience six floors up explaining the movements she was doing while watching her perform below.
Child's choreography demands a concentrated all-over attention;it is cumulative, it aims at transporting, not education the audience. (167)
Cunningham is the most important champion of the anti-expressive and anti-subjective, and most of the choreographers who studied with him have extended his emphasis on objective and impersonality. To choreograph means to give movement a rhythmic, countable time structure. (169)
Child's doesn't use in-place movements (live penche, passe developpe, grands battements) that exhibit positions, that display technique. he classical tradition of dance is related to courtesy. (171)
Repetition as an accumulation of effects, as layering. Though usually presented as cool choice, repetition always suggests perfectionist zeal. Repetition is a technique that seems to suggest simplicity, that in principle enhances legibility or intelligibility. (174)
Child's choreographs for herself differently than she does for the rest of the company. As a soloist she gives herself a wider range of dynamic changes, more evolution in the material (rather than in space). (175)
Reading Three:
Tim Miller (2000) ‘Extreme Exposure: An Anthology of Solo Performance Texts from the Twentieth Century, ed. Jo Bonney, New York: Theatre Communications Group. pp. 155- 163
In Tim Miller's piece 'Spilt Milk,' he speaks about the the struggle and conflicts of being a gay man. This whole piece is about (I would think he was talking about himself) and his travels after leaving home at 19 and making his way by hitchhiking to look for a place that gay men could be free and not be judged.
Tim Miller is a gay performer who uses his performances to show the struggles, violence and weaves his political agenda of gay rights activism with personal stories. "In 'Spilt Milk' we see a shard of that struggle; repeatedly in his work, he illuminates the seemingly endless conflict between what we know and ourselves as gay men and what the world tells us is so," (2000, 156).
The link below is a blog of the artist called 'Tim Miller Queer Performance' in which he takes you through his journey through his works and had posts that talks about his travel, workshops and performances. In his latest post 'October 2011' he talks about all that is to come from him in 2012 with dates of his upcoming performances.
http://timmillerperfomer.blogspot.com/
The Video below is a clip from his piece 'Spilt Milk' and the way he has performed it with not so much movement but the use of his voice in which the tempo of speaking continually changes showing his characters nervousness and excitement.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKNgqJz8u0M
http://www.timmillerperformer.com/
There is an article from 'Theater Mania' talking about a teaching performance that Tim Miller will be taking in Philadelphia after one of his other teaching performances were cancelled by another school because 'Villanova said in part that the administration felt Miller's planned workshops "were not in keeping with our Catholic and Augustinian values and mission."
http://www.theatermania.com/philadelphia/news/02-2012/tim-miller-to-teach-performance-workshop-at-bryn-m_51146.html
Reading Four:
Deb Margolin (2000) ‘Extreme Exposure: An Anthology of Solo Performance Texts from the Twentieth Century, ed. Jo Bonney, New York: Theatre Communications Group. pp. 323-331
Within Deb Margolin's play 'Bill Me later,' she plays Monica Lewisnky and gives a lot of emphasis on the feminine sexuality.
She looks at how woman in this case Lewinsky uses her sexuality to her advantage not only on getting a job but also how easy it is to seduce men.
In the opening part of the play she talks about how 'man' wants every woman, she says 'The beauty of this man is, he wants all of us. An American can have a piece of his ass without so much as an in-store coupon. He'll do it with anyone. And that means me,' (2000, 325)
In that paragraph she is speaking as though her character of Lewinsky on how she thinks that the president 'Bill Clinton' was able to get any woman he wanted.
'Deb Margolin came out of her de-sexualized closet to take on what has been perhaps the biggest sex scandal in U.S hostory;...in the Clinton/Lewinsky multimillion dollar fiasco - which reached its climax, not unsuprisingly, with the deaths of 'third-world people,'" (2000, 324)
As with all of her performances, Bill me Later exemplifies Margolin's unique way of making political/philosophical commentary at once farcical and deadly serious, giving even more clout to her piercing critiques of a culture so dissociated from itself that the few of us shrieking the question: 'DID YOU SEE THAT?' can scarcely be heard. (2000, 324)
This is the official web page of Deb Margolin and it includes all her published works and biographic information on this solo performer. It also includes reviews and contact information if you want to contact her regarding her work.
http://www.debmargolin.com/
Deb Margolin is a playwright, performance artist and founding member of Split Britches Theater Company. She is the author of eight full-length solo performance pieces, which she has toured throughout the United States, as well as numerous plays, and is the recipient of a 1999-2000 OBIE Award for Sustained Excellence of Performance and the Kesselring Playwriting Award for her play Three Seconds in the Key in 2005. In May of 2007 she traveled on a Fulbright Senior Specialist grant to University of Tel Aviv to present her play Critical Mass, in a Hebrew translation.
Bobby Baker (Guardian Video)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/video/2010/may/12/art-mental-illness
While I was listening to this interview of how Bobby Baker spoke about how she felt I could see a bit of myself in her words. Where she talks about wondering about having something physically wrong in her head I remember myself always thinking that maybe I had a tumor or something in me that was bad and wanted to come out and I so desperately trying not to let it out. 'Like I've got a monster inside of me.'
This artist used her own personal experiences within her performances and showed her struggle with mental illness and the journey she went through everyday. Also when she speaks about wearing a mask around people, I personally think that is exactly how I am. A lot what she talks about within this interview I feel as though she is talking about me. The same with her drawing and how she says about hiding herself from others. Only recently have I like Bobby Baker been sharing a bit more of my thoughts and what I've been going through in a blog that I write on as much as I can.
http://fallenangelcrissydee.blogspot.com/
Bobby Baker spent 11 years battling mental illness, an experience she recorded in performances and hundreds of private drawings. She explains why at long last she's making this remarkable artistic autobiography public.
These are some of the drawings from bobby Baker.
Bibliography:
Bonney, J (2000) Extreme Exposure: An Anthology of Solo Performance Texts from the Twentieth Century. New York: Theater Communications Group.
British Council Literature (2011) 'Zena Edwards,' http://literature.britishcouncil.org/zena-edwards (accessed 22 February 2012)
Guardian (2010) 'Bobby Baker,' United Kingdom http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/video/2010/may/12/art-mental-illness(Accessed 26 February 2012).
Heddon, D. (2006) 'Beyond the Self: Autobiography as Dialogue.' Wallace, C. Monologues: Theater, Performance, Subjectivity. Prague: Litteria Pragensia
Margolin, D. 'The Official Website of Performance Artist Deb Margolin,' (accessed 26 February 2012) http://www.debmargolin.com/
Miller, T (2009) 'Harvey Milk section 'Spilt Milk' by Tim Miller from the Golden States, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKNgqJz8u0M (Accessed 26 February 2012).
Miller, T 'Tim Miller Queer Performance' http://timmillerperfomer.blogspot.com/ (Accessed 26 February 2012).
Sontag, S. (2009) Where the Stress Falls. Penguin Classics
Theater Mania (2012) 'Tim Miller to Teach Performance Workshop at Bryn Mawr Following Cancellation at Villanova' Philadelphia. http://www.theatermania.com/philadelphia/news/02-2012/tim-miller-to-teach-performance-workshop-at-bryn-m_51146.html(Accessed 26 February 2012)
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