7 March 2012
Lecture:
Today we had a guest lecturer MARIE GABRIELLE-ROTIE: She is a choreographer and performer.
She trained as a fine artist (painter and sculptor). When she finished her degree is still was interested in dance and so started doing community dance classes. By accident in 1992 she discovered Butoh (which is a Japanese dance that relies heavily on the work of the feet and needs discipline).
Marie found that Butoh helped her to move creatively. In 1994 she began creating choreography that was both site-specific and for the stage. As she was a trained painter and sculptor she used those elements within her work bu painting with movement and sculpting the space.
Her first solo was Scapula (1999). Scapula was inspired by her education and investigation with philosophy. She made her performances in her bedroom by moving all the furniture to one side and created a working space. This particular performance took her 2 years to make.
She used a lot of controversial images within her work and likes to create her work in sections. Scapula was a piece that was created from various different stands. Marie liked to explore flight, voice work and gravity within her work. In 2003 she did a piece called 'Mutability' in which she used signs of the anatomy. Dressed in a skin colored leotard. This piece started as a specimen in a jar and mutated in various other things.
These are some videos of her work:
Mythic:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThevW8Ne4X8
Black Mirror:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_jyq4yyhL4
Black Mirror was a piece Marie did in 2006 that she explored the idea of vampires and witches. While making this piece she asked herself 'how can she deconstruct her image and deconstruct herself,' and therefore began playing with representations of her inner thoughts and emotions. This piece was a Gothic piece. She did a lot of work with her hands, feet and face and tried testing out the center of gravity. She uses the concept of the demonic and the dark self and her inner shadow.
This is her website:
http://www.rotieproductions.com/
This is a Butoh website that is a non-profit unincorporated organization who since 1997 had all its events directed and produced by Marie Gabrielle-Rotie.
http://www.butohuk.com/
The silent scream in which she uses in one of her pieces or the image of a silent scream is related to Butoh.
Movements emerges from internal movements. She looks a lot at the darkness of the human being vs the darkness of the psyche.
Speaking on how she made her solos, Marie says that 'it is harder to create a solo without struggle.' There are three types of struggles:
1) Mental discipline/struggle: allowing yourself to go inside your head and be open to sharing your thoughts.
2) Self-Belief: Believing in your work and in your ability to do the work.
3) Distance yourself: Being able to make sense of what you're doing while doing it. SO being able to detach yourself from your work in order to be able to see it critically and see what is working and what is not.
You need to learn to see yourself from the inside out.
ONE SOLO BUILDS FROM ANOTHER SOLO, BUT IT IS LIKE STARTING WITH NOTHING.
EXERCISES:
The first exercise that Marie got us to do was to place 13 chairs in a row and those that had volunteered had to sit in a neutral position. She then pointed to people in the audience and asked them to give one instruction but it had to be precis such as move your right elbow towards your right ear. In total 3 instruction had to be given, and the volunteers had to perform these actions in a slow motion. When there was a 4th instruction given it override the 1st instruction and the 2nd and 3rd instruction moved up to one and two.
this exercise in itself was very interesting to watch because just the slowest of the movement and the positions that the participants went into was amazing.
Exercise Two:
Withering:
This exercise required the participants to stand in neutral and focus on one point in the room pretending you are looking at a horizon. Just like a plant that withers, the participants had to follow their bodies impulses and over the course of 7 and a half minutes make their way to the floor.
When I was doing this exercise at first I felt as though I was going to end up still upright once the 7 and a half minutes past. But as I become concentrated on the one point I had chosen to focus on I could feel my body relax. Slowly without even noticing it at first I could feel my body from my knees begin to soften and at that point I had noticed that my upper body had already slumped over. As I neared the floor I could feel my legs begin to burn because as I was not trying to make my way onto the floor I was following my body's impulses that were guiding me. When the 7 and a half minutes were up I noticed that I was already sitting on the floor.
Exercise Three:
Blossoming:
This time from a sitting position we had to make our way to a standing point without using our hands to hold our weight but to find in our body a way to get up naturally. This time this exercise was done over ten minutes. We were told to relax and close our eyes if we wanted to and not to rush but to take our time to feel our body.
Again this exercise took a while for me to get into but then I could feel my body move and eventually change position. Making my way from a sitting position onto my side and my legs made their way to the side of my body, then onto my knees and slowly beginning to stand up straight.
Exercise Four:
Movement with Body:
In this exercise we were given different imaginary objects that we had to work with:
a) A Stone Book,
b) Strangling a chicken,
c) Ivy on the hands,
d) Smoke flowing through a chimney,
e) Garden in a hat.
Over ten minutes we had to go from one movement to the next and try to feel the weight, feel and sensations of the objects. I found it hard with some of the movements to be able to envision them.
Afternoon Workshop:
We started by doing a 'speed dating exercise.'
In two groups as A & B, we had to take it in turns to ask and answer questions about our solo performance such as concept, staging, movement, e.t.c. Within one minute A asked B a question in which B had to answer. Once the minute was up A had to move anti-clockwise to the next person and ask them some questions regarding their solo. We did this for about ten minutes then we changed where B was to ask A the questions and A had to answer.
Next we had to get up with whichever partner we had and try out aspects of our performance, giving one another feedback. We had to make at least a 2 minute performance. Afterwards we all had to share with the class what we had so far, however it was just a showing and no questions or feedback was given.
Solo Performance: Trevor Noah:
I watched a comedy show in which I regard as a solo piece because it was one person who was performing. He is a very popular South African comedian and has only been performing for two years. He bases his work on his own personal experiences and speaks about the differences within the cultures he grew up in referring to the time of apartheid, his father a Swiss white man and his mother a black woman from Soweto. He also ties his performances with the cultures of the other South African people and make fun at the political aspects of the country from the different presidents and also his journey's within Europe and America. He plays each of his characters by changing and taking on their accents and speaking styles and also their movements and gestures. He plays with the concepts of political, historical and cultural in his piece. This relates back to last weeks class in which I was talking about the social/performative of solo performance.
This is his official Site:
http://www.trevornoah.co.za/
In this piece he looks at the President Jacob Zuma:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q12H1dpOwdE
This video looks at how Trevor Noah started as a comedian:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNp1NXlUQY0
Reading One:
Dolan, J. (2001) 'Performance, Utopia and the "Utopian Performative'" Theater Journal 53. pp. 455-479
People watch 'live theater' as a means to get ideas in which might help them change aspects of their outside lives, with themselves and/or with others.
Theater audiences attend shows to find meaning and wants to be moved by the performance. They want to hear stories that engage with personal and cultural relationships and critique the social system.
Theater creates a way that people can participate in possibilities for social equity and justice are shared.
Utopian is not restricted to fiction but also include visionary as well as constitutional writings that look and help towards a better society. To make an ideal future, culture has to move farther into a performative in order to make people inspired to act likewise.
I think what this reading is trying to say is that through performance, people get a chance to learn about the troubles facing different people around the world and it is a spring-board for change. If audiences can connect with a performance or come away feeling something from what they have experienced maybe something can be done to make things better therefore making the world a better place, as they say a utopia.
Live theater remains a powerful site at which to establish and exchange notions of cultural taste, to set standards, and to model fashions, trends, and styles. (455)
To use performance as a tool for making the world better, to use performance to incite people to profound responses that shake their consciousness of themselves in the world. (456)
Theater remains, a space of desire, of longing, of loss, in which moved by a gesture, a word, a glance, in which I'm startled by confrontation with morality (my own and others). (456)
Utopia means literally, 'no-place,' and of course was first coined in the sixteenth century by Thomas More. (457)
Ronald Schaer says, 'Utopia, one might say, is the measure of how far a society can retreat from itself when it wants to feign what it would like to become. (457)
Auslander argues, 'against the idea that live performance itself somehow generates whatever sense of community one may experience...mediatized performance makes just as effective a focal point for the gathering of a social group as live performance.' (459)
Feelings and sensibilities, in performance, give rise to what i'm calling the 'utopian performative.' (460)
Many performances, of course, derive their cultural capital by virtue of their location, or from how closely they mirror the properties of high or middlebrow culture, and/or by how enthusiastically they're sanctioned by critics and the theatrical marketplace as 'must see' events. (461)
Dyer's taxonomy of utopia in entertainment includes energy, abundance, intensity, transparency (by which he means sincerity), and community, all of which organized the effective reach of the UT performance series. (464)
Feminist and lesbian performance carried so much weight when it first began to appear, bravely and insistently, in sub cultural places in New York and in communities around the country. Hughes...deconstructed the notion of 'preaching to the converted,' an issue...that political work reaches a too narrow audience of people already persuaded to think progressively. Performance, is a renewal of faith, and progressive politics are always faith-based. (465)
External voices drives Hughes' movement through the piece, from commentators whose names are familiar from national radio and television spin shows, to friends, to agents, to editors calling to exploit her notoriety or to describe it back to her as a good thing. (467)
The danger of theater is in the power of presence, in the power of the transformations it makes possible. (469)
Shaw says, 'I'm just thousand parts of other people mashed into one body. I am not an original person. I take all these pieces, snatch them off of the floor where they land before they get swept under the bed by the light, and I manufacture myself. I wish I could hold time still, just lift it up to that tube of bright fluorescent light to examine it.' (471)
Deb Margolin said, that for a woman, standing up in front of people is a radical political act, expressing, as it does, the desire to speak. (473)
Waiting for Utopia to reveal itself requires grace, provides a ethic for living... (475)
Perhaps the seeds of Utopia are only present at times of failure and apocalypse. (476)
The human capacity to tell stories is one way men and women collectively build a significant and orderly world around themselves...Narratives are a relatively safe or innocuous place in which the reigning assumptions of a given culture can be criticized. (477)
The passion of the audience explains why live performance continues; the desire to see it, to participate in its world-makings persists...to perpetuate experiences of utopia in the flesh of performance that might performatively hint at how different the world could feel. (478)
Communitas...tend to be inclusive - some might call it generous. This, is the beginning (and perhaps the substance) of the utopic performative: in the performer's grace, in the audiences generosity, in the lucid power of intersubjective understanding, however fleeting. These are the moments when we can believe in utopia. These are the moments theater and performance make possible. (479).
Reading Two:
Laurie Anderson (1990) 'Out from under: Texts by Women Performance Artists. New York: Theater communication Group. pp. 45 - 53
I looked briefly at this artist in an earlier post.
From this book 'out from under' it looks at Laurie Anderson's work from a female perspective. In her piece 'United States' it looks at different sections, in one she talks about a dream she had in which she saw her mother and in a way she interpreted it as her mother talking to her about her work and how she was a structuralist filmmaker. There is another piece in which she talks about being Jimmy Carter's lover. I think this is focused on how she thinks the presidents act because they are in power. Most of her pieces are made from her own experiences from childhood and also from the way she see's the world.
Reading Three:
Holly Hughes (1990) 'Out from under: Texts by Women Performance Artists. New York: Theater communication Group. pp. 3 - 32
Within her piece 'World without end' Holly Hughes plays with gender bending. While reading the play I got really confused in the way it was written because from time to time you would think she was playing herself (which she probably is) but at other times she talks of herself as a male form. It is a kind of disturbing piece as she speaks about her mother and what she was taught growing up. She speaks about the way she saw her mother and I guess in a kind of incest way. She talks about how she mother hated meat and then switches to talking about paying for his/her girlfriends abortion. In a way I think that she also plays with alter-egos although in her case her alter-ego is a male. She speaks in a way as the view of women that men see and how they objectify and sexualize women. In one segment of the play she speaks about Adam and Eve and how she sees them differently to how they are meant to be.
Holly Hughes is a writer and performer, a “thespian’s thespian.” her body of work which includes 15 solo and group performance pieces was offered by the LA Times: “Holly Hughes is everything you ever wanted in a lesbian performance artist and less.”
This website you can contact the artist or book her for a show but it also looks at who she is and there work.
http://www.hollyhughesperformance.com/
An Interview with Holly Hughes:
http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/55721
In a review for the New York Time for her theater performance of 'World Without End'
Late in her solo performance piece, ''World Without End,'' Holly Hughes reimagines the story of Adam and Eve as a semiautobiographical, hard-boiled B-movie set in the bohemian environs of the Lower East Side. As the primal couple make love, Ms. Hughes wonders aloud to her partner: ''Buddy, do you have any idea who I am? I am the premier lesbian performance artist from Michigan.''
At once funny and feisty, self-affirming and self-mocking, the scene exemplifies Ms. Hughes's iconoclastic brand of feminist art. In subverting sexual and social stereotypes, she rejects the more solemn, mystical tone of much feminist literature to present a cheerful, rough-and-tumble portrait of unloosed female sexuality. Introducing her version of Adam and Eve, she goes out of her way to address the word ''whore'' and an anti-lesbian epithet with a double-edged good humor. Somewhat ironically, she suggests that they be seen as positive labels for women who are good at sex. http://theater.nytimes.com/mem/theater/treview.html?res=9C0CE0D61E3CF935A35753C1A966958260
WORLD WITHOUT END at P.S. 122
The most astonishing images that emerge from Holly Hughes' densely written solo performance rudely confront a mother's sexuality. In the parking lot of the H&H Bakery in Pinconning, Mich., she beats a porcupine to death with an axe handle and offers the bloody pulp to her daughter as a science project. Inviting her daughter to share the bathtub, she uses her own body to demonstrate the facts of life: "She said she liked to smell herself. It made her a better gardener. There's no word for a woman who has that kind of power over tomatoes." The daughter -- horrified, jealous, aroused -- watches her parents make love on her mother's deathbed. Hughes is at heart a poet, and like the best of them she uses language not to dress up the messy emotions of life but to strip them till they're raw and shivering. Her writing is an unlikely mating of Ntozake Shange's feminist humor-with-anger and Sam Shepard's dirt-plain purity; in a little more than an hour, World Without End travels from Saginaw to the Lower East Side, nailing in the sparsest terms the holy sound of zippers ("Jesus loves that gettin'-naked sound") and the cozy aroma of a Denny's ("things in general frying"). And like a number of her writer-performer contemporaries (David Cale, Chris Durang, Karen Finely), Hughes struggles to find theatrical form for her passionate, impolite content. She mixes narrative, song, and tirade so unpredictably that you almost dread to hear what she'll say next. Yet afterwards it's stunning and satisfying to realize you've been in the hands of a master writer who learned well at her mother's knee, "Nobody's scared enough. http://donshewey.com/theater_reviews/world_without_end.html
Reading Four:
Karen Finley (1990) 'Out from under: Texts by Women Performance Artists. New York: Theater communication Group. pp. 55 - 70
This is another disturbing artist and the way she does her plays. In the piece 'First Sexual experience, Laundromat,' she speaks about how she is a human penis and when the child is being pushed out of it's mother it is like a giant penis. In the piece Refrigerator she talks about the first memory she has of her father in which is puts her naked body in the refrigerator. This piece seems to focus on her sexual abuse by her father and how her mother was blind to what was happening. The way she describes her experiences is very graphic and you find yourself being drawn in what she is saying as though it is you that it is happening too.
Karen Finley was born in Chicago. her mother was a political activist and her father Buddhist and a practicing jazz musician. She began noticing that 'women had their power sexually rather than economically or politically, so she began talking about that in her work. That's why most of her pieces speak about sexuality and how women are treated by men. Finely does research about a subject that interests her, then enters into a state of deep concentration. Her work comes from an 'emotional commitment to something she feels very urgently about and needs to be changed now.' (Champagne, 1990; 57)
http://karenfinley.com/
This is a video with live performances by Karen Finely. Scenes taken from the film Mondo New York.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sql8MbkMQ5o
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Champagne, L. (1990) 'Out from under: Texts by Women Performance Artists. New York: Theater communication Group.
Dolan, J. (2001) 'Performance, Utopia and the "Utopian Performative'" Theater Journal 53.
Holly Hughes http://www.hollyhughesperformance.com/ (Accessed 4 March 2012)
Don Shewey (1989) 'Review World Without End' http://donshewey.com/theater_reviews/world_without_end.html (Accessed 4 March 2012)
Karen Finely http://karenfinley.com/ (Accessed 4 March 2012)
Karen Finley (2011) 'Live Performance' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sql8MbkMQ5o (Accessed 4 March 2012)
New York Times (1990) 'World Without End' http://theater.nytimes.com/mem/theater/treview.html?res=9C0CE0D61E3CF935A35753C1A966958260 (Accessed 4 March 2012)
Trevor Noah (2010) http://www.trevornoah.co.za/ (Accessed 4 March 2012)
Youtube (2012) 'Township to Stage - Official Trailer featuring Trevor Noah' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNp1NXlUQY0 (Accessed 4 March 2012)
Youtube (2012) 'Trevor Noah: Crazy Normal - President Jacob Zuma's Speech' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q12H1dpOwdE (Accessed 4 March 2012)
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