Keep it:

Blindly leading the audience. It worked really well, and I think we should continue to explore options in blurring the performer/audience. Madeline was talking about only doing the leading for a few people, and I think thats an interesting idea to explore–only having a few people participate in each of the pieces while the rest observe. I really like experimenting with form, and I want to continue that. I also want to keep the concept of failure (but I think we should expand outward and get more than just that–someone was talking about relationship between failure and success and i think that would be cool).

Leave it:

The museum exhibit style showing was a bust and I think it’s gotta go (at least in the form it last took). I do like the idea of working in a space like the directing studio rather than a real theatre because it further distorts audience/performer relationship, but I’d be open to explore other options. I think if we do keep the same space, we should avoid showing videos on ipads–it created a weird space where not everyone was in tune to their surroundings. It just felt off. In general, the more static work i think just doesn’t have a place anymore as objects in an of themselves. That being said, they explore really interesting ideas and it would be good to use them as stepping stones to new pieces or incorporate them into performances.

Want it:

I think there should be one on one performing. When we separated people from the group (like jackson’s closet), it became a much more personal experience. I also want more of a unifying aesthetic and general direction. Because we’re experimenting with form (which i really like), I don’t know whether having a narrative would just complicate things in a bad way. That doesn’t mean we shouldnt have a general path or message or experience that we want the audience to see. I also think it’s time to stop creating work individually and in small teams of students–our work is very disjointed because of individual creations, which was cool in the early stages; but if we want create a more unified piece, it would help to have smaller groups of students. Probably not splitting the class in two–not everyones voice is heard in larger groups. I think perhaps we should look at creating pieces with context in mind–say we decide on a theme, a narrative. The david carter stories are great, but as others were saying in their posts, it didn’t present the way we were hoping so perhaps using those stories as a basis for a performance would be interesting. It would create much more flow if we are thinking as we make it WHERE we want to take the piece next.

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.