Keep It

Something I would like to keep/develop further is the theme of “failure” that seems to be seeping into our world (i.e. failure of memory, failure of justice, failure of humans, etc.). This, of course, is a big theme to tackle, but I wonder what it would be like to invest more into this idea. My first instinct is to go back to those pieces (about failure) that we’ve made and discuss their commonalities/differences. Though those conversations, we might be able to pinpoint the ideas within topic of “failure” that most interests us. I’m also interested in how this idea of failure can relate to the audience – performer relationship (How do we perform failure in front of people vs authentically fail in font of people?) Maybe then we split up into groups and and make tiny (like one minute) performances? Up until this point, we’ve been creating a lot of “solo” work, but think it might be good to start putting minds together.

We’ve also been creating a lot of “striking” images (like Bailey in the box, or Omar standing in front of harsh light reciting poetry, or Sophia in the elevator, etc). I guess I’d like to continue to explore the way external elements (lights, sound, etc.) help to support our work.

Leave it

This has kind of already been touched on, but I would like to leave behind the “museum” aesthetic. Our presentation never really felt cohesive “piece” to me, which was a little frustrating. I thought the audience was inundated with so many mediums, that they didn’t really know where to look or how to look at things. Instead, it seems as if they gravitated more our “performances” rather than the collection of things in the space.

Want it

Narrative! I’m interested how we can incorporate more narrative into our work. Most of the work we’ve created has been centered around an idea or a story. I would love to talk more about why that is. How can we create narrative solely though text, image, or movement? When can those things be combined to enhance a piece of work? How can those things be juxtaposed and still (somehow) support the content of a piece? What are ways we can turn the concept of narrative on its head?

KEEP:

Exploring the audience/performer relationship… this is pretty obvious and basic, and I think most of us in our work explore this relationship in interesting ways without conscious effort. The pieces that have intrigued me most in this class are ones that disrupt and expand the conventional audience/performer relationship. Reiterating what some other people have mentioned: one-on-one performances (actually, I originally intended for Human Again to be a one-on-one performance, and it sort of is, but it lost most of that personal one-on-one connection in both performances, mostly because of time. I know a lot of people mentioned moving on from the gallery-work, but I do think the performer/audience relationship is interesting to explore in a gallery versus a theater setting. Performance installations interest me (the performer is physically present), static visual/video arts less so (performers not necessarily present)…

HOWEVER, this is a formal interest rather than a content-based one, and I do want to continue making work from a content-based perspective, i.e. making stories, turning pieces of information into works of art, etc (following Taylor’s idea of form follows content). This is maybe just a me thing, but I find it really difficult to make engaging work when the starting point is purely formal. BUT ALSO making stories does not necessarily mean narrative, I am super interested in making non-narrative work.

LEAVE

I want to leave behind the process we’ve been using so far of making individual work and trying to layer it/put it together to create meaning. It has definitely led to some interesting work, and new things discovered about pieces when they’re put in a new context, but I would like to try other methods of devising, i.e. working in a smaller group. I want to leave behind the idea of making one piece with fourteen people–I think it’s super difficult to get every voice heard, and inevitably people’s voices and works are lost.

Another thing we’ve been doing is giving feedback, but not giving too much time to actually work the pieces. This is mostly because we haven’t had that time, but as the class progresses I would like to make work, get feedback, and then rework that piece.

WANT

There’s nothing new that I really want, just changes and adjustments to what we already have, like working in smaller groups. I would like to maybe explore specific methods of devising? We’ve had some readings but we haven’t actually tried anything out in the studio… and maybe there are methods of specific devised theatre groups that we could try out?

Keep It:

Echoing what others have already said, I feel that our opening (and live performances in general) have been strong enough to merit further development. Even without a unifying theme, I feel that each of our live pieces elicits some sort of visceral audience response, although you apparently have to “hit the bong pretty hard beforehand.”

Leave It:

…Also echoing what others have already said, I think we can safely relegate the artifact museum to actual museum status…as in history, as in gone. Specifically, the I-pad video displays, which are by default a passive viewer experience, even if the content of the videos themselves is engaging. Perhaps we’ll find a place for projected video or video as an element of live performance, but for the most part I think we would be best to avoid static, pre-recorded media in general.

Want It:

……………………….Echoing what someone else said, I would like to see a piece that somehow explores success as opposed to failure. Perhaps it could even explore both?!?! I’d love to see a short piece (really short, half a minute?) that repeats and repeats but can be influenced by audience input to change the outcome ~ maybe a living gallery of choose-your-own-adventure short scenes where audience interaction determines whether a piece “succeeds” or “fails” within the context of each? Yeah!

1. I would really like us to keep and expand upon ways of putting the audience in unique situations that they aren’t used to in a traditional theatrical context, such as the opening, or some of our other participatory performances. I’d be interested in developing those ideas further and making them more connected and cohesive. We currently have a lot of different, disparate ways that the audience is involved in the performance, and I’m curious about ways we could make those different ways more connected, so that the audience has an understanding of the general rules of how the space works, even if small things change moment to moment.

2. I feel like a lot of the work we’ve made that is not performance based has run its course. I think the ideas contained in that work are interesting and there is definitely potential to expand upon them, but I think we’ve now moved beyond the usefulness of showing the more static, non-performance based work. It seems to not engage the audience in the same way as the live performances, and I think the format of presentation of all of those objects is a little crippling- it very distinctly shapes how we set up our space, and it allows the audience to distance themselves from some of the work, which I feel ended up at odds with the more immersive performances.

3. We haven’t really talked about creating something with more distinctive characters and moments of more narrative. I’m not necessarily saying that we should prescribe narrative to the entire piece, but I would be interested in exploring ways to add a character or two into the piece and letting their choices shape parts of a narrative tying different moments together.

Keep it:

I think the beginning is a particularly powerful way to start a performance. It lets the audience know that we want to have a relationship with them and that we’re asking them to trust us. It violates their expectations right away, which maybe sometimes can be bad, but I think is ultimately good in the context of what we’re doing because we can still surprise them within the piece without throwing them for a total loop (ie: they enter the space and sit down, expecting to watch a performance, and then we randomly do something totally crazy and freak them out). With Carina’s beginning, we freak them out from the start but in a safe and caring way. This part also really seemed to stick with most of the people I talked to and starting the piece with such an interesting sensory experience seems like the way to go with what we’re doing.

Leave it:

The iPad as a video-viewing medium. I think video-viewing needs to be an EXPERIENCE, similar to Paige’s video in the closet or the giant projected backwards writing video. I think there are better ways for people to have individual interactions with our material than to have them sit at an iPad with headphones on.

Want it:

In that vein, I am interested in incorporating one-on-one conversations/performances. This was something I sort of tried to incorporate into the showing with Jackson’s closet. I told Jackson that what I liked about his cocaine/flower performance was the character that he created. During the showing, I wanted him to just go up to people while being that character and ask people about their favorite flower. I think there’s something interesting to explore theatrically with the idea of a human library. A performer asking questions of the audience one-on-one. A performer wanting to be asked questions by the audience. A theme that may be emerging/that we certainly seem to be questioning is audience-performer relationship. How do we establish a friendship with our audience versus how do we alienate them? Contrasting one-on-one performances with other performance mediums could be a way to explore that.

KEEP

I’m still really fascinated by this idea of disorientation/distortion. I’d love to see us play more with what the audience can/can’t see, when they can see it, and the lens through which they see things. I’m thinking back to speaking with people who saw our WIP showing, and I heard so much positive feedback about the top of the piece when they were led into the space with blindfolds on. I think that that element of uncertainty and surprise is so intriguing and I think there are more places we can go with it! I love the way that we didn’t see Sophia in piece yesterday right away. In fact, we had to FIND her. Maddie in her singing/dancing piece also played with that concept. I’d like to see us expand on that!

LEAVE

I am now ready to leave the Food theme behind. We did so much of it in class and then carried it into the WIP showing too, and I think that perhaps we’ve gotten everything we’re going to get out of it. I think that if we continue to use food in our pieces and encourage the audience to eat during out showings that it should take on some new shape. I don’t know what that shape would be, but those are my thoughts!

WANT

We haven’t done any one audience member – one performer pieces yet, and I would really like to see that appear as we continue to develop! I’ve only seen one or two shows in my life where I was the only person in a room with a performer, and those times felt so much more like EXPERIENCES than PERFORMANCES for me. One of the things we’re interested in is testing the limits of the audience and the concept of surrender, and I think incorporating pieces where only one person can see it at a time would be a great way to develop those ideas. Also, if it’s a repeated performance (which it most likely would be, because we’d want more than one person to see it), that’s a method of testing the limits for the performers as well!

What if we each had a one-on-one performance with an audience member? What if an entire show was the audience moving from performer to performer gathering different chunks of info that, together, formed a story? What if they didn’t form a story? What if every audience member saw the performances in a different order??? JUST SOME EXCITED THOUGHTS.

Keep It, Leave It, Want It

1. I really like the work we’re doing in regards to stories, memory, and how we remember things in distorted/different ways just by the mere nature of how our minds work. I really think we could continue pushing these ideas especially if we move toward a more narrative-based performance or pieces. Perhaps we should look for ways to expand on certain performances or bring different objects together under a larger narrative or performance.
2. I feel like we haven’t really done much with the theme of “Shit of Everyday Life” or if we have, it’s always taken second-place to a different theme or a broader idea and doesn’t really come through all that well. I would say this would be an opportunity to explore something more in depth, but I feel like we aren’t all that interested in it to begin with and we’re gravitating toward themes that seem much more interesting to us. Maybe we can continue to come back to it in other ways, but for right now I think we should drop it as a major theme/priority.
3. I feel like we’ve talked a lot about failures—different kinds of failures, different ways of failing, authentic versus non-authentic failure, etc.—but we haven’t talked much about success. Now, I know success is boring and probably wouldn’t be as interesting to explore as failure, but I feel like it would be a good counterpoint with which to think about failure more deeply. We may not necessarily have to create any sort of performance or object to be shown in public, but we might think of success in order to think more critically about what it means to fail and what different kinds of failures mean.

Keep it

I really liked the beginning of the performance, and I’d love to continue in that vein, with the audience taking up the space in a non-traditional way (standing and traveling through it) but perhaps with more direction (that can still be implicit). A lot of the work that resonated with me and seems to resonate with the audience is the things presented in darkness/ alone/ blindfolded, a theme we wanted to explore more. Perhaps we should play with having more darkness in the room and introducing light to exhibit important things (spotlighting a performance, a video playing on the wall, a flashlight that lights up). This would tie into themes of failure and audience surrender as well.

Leave it

I think we should abandon the museum structure in favor of more continuity/ narrative. There could still be museum-like portions, (partitioned into corridors?) but perhaps they would be more thematically grouped and evenly separated by performance moments, and we (the performers) wouldn’t be present beyond an art installation capacity (Bailey in the box, for example).

Want it

It seems that a lot of the kind of work we’re interested in presenting calls for dynamic space, in that we want to have corridors and large spaces and cramped spaces. That being said, I think it could be really cool to have moving walls, like cloth hanging down that’s on wheels so we could change the shape of the space throughout the performance really easily and still stage it all in one place. This could also be used to sort of herd the audience in a specific direction without having to explicitly tell them where to go or what to do.

My friends’ impressions:

Friend 1

-really disliked the sections of not knowing what to do, or rather, what she could do

-didn’t know bailey’s thing was about hiccups or that carina’s thing was about the syrian refugee crisis until someone told her later

-geography board thing broke her heart

-super impressed w/ Omar’s knowledge of the black panthers + his puns

-felt like kimmy’s ledge piece ‘got me’ as in understood her

-other impression of bailey’s thing ‘it was weird because it seemed like he should be the vulnerable one because he was naked in a box but once you put your head in the hole you’re the vulnerable one’

-several pieces ‘made me think about words’, paige’s genesis video, sarah’s federalist papers

-Would you recommend devised theatre to a friend? ‘I would recommend it to my friend who I see theatre things with’

Friend 2 (who had to leave midway through the milling-about portion)

-was one of the first people led into the room. Entertained herself by trying to figure out if the music was truly from beauty and the beast or a facsimile

-liked gabrielle’s letter thing

-volume issues with some of the ipads

-Paige’s OCD poster ‘i was into that’

-Kimmy’s barking was ‘scarily realistic’

-liked Paige’s genesis video. She saw it because gabrielle (a good friend of hers) directed her to the closet. same deal with bailey’s piece, saw it because a friend of hers in the class specifically directed her to it

-Would you recommend devised theatre to a friend? ‘not to anyone specifically empirical’

Mine:

The people I invited were both some of the first to be led into the room, and standing there for 5-10 minutes blindfolded with no direction while loud music looped was irksome. Both described an internal battle about whether or not to take off the blindfold, because they were standing there for so long that eventually they were sure that they had done something wrong and were screwing up the performance by not taking it off. Both eventually took it off, saw that everyone still had theirs on, and felt more bad for having screwed up the performance in that way. I don’t think we can make people endure stuff like that unless there’s some kind of point directly related to the thing they endure. For that piece, it seemed like the unreasonable duration was an unintended consequence, not related to the content of the piece, but for the people who came in early, the experience became all about the duration. They also both described feeling tentative about interacting with stuff for the rest of the presentation because of it.

I think a lot of things would be solved by just spending more time preparing for the presentation. We might have devoted more thought to the audience experience, specifically how we translate stuff from the context of being seen in class by each other to a presentation context. When we saw each other’s ELI5 pieces we for the most part knew their subjects ahead of time. The experience of watching Carina’s piece when we know it’s about the syrian refugee crisis is very different from watching it and trying to figure out what it’s about the whole time. We also might have communicated with each other better- I wanted to spend the whole presentation in the electrics closet without the audience knowing I was there, only to emerge at moments of my choosing, but I didn’t tell anyone except gabrielle. So maddie using the closet for the end of the opening piece and john checking twice to see if I was okay messed it up, but they had no way of knowing that. Actually maybe the communication thing is just a problem with me.