I had Bob Dylan, the the self-righteous voice of his generation playing in the background during the session to inspire some ‘beat the system’ vibes.
What did I have with me?
Rope: To show entrapment, restraints, ‘no strings attached’ and obstacles.
String: Tedious, hard to work with, represents the little niggles in life, the things you don’t look for and more obstacles.
Chair: used daily for rest, support, working, schooling, leisure
Table: to eat at, place items on, dinner time,
Scissors: represents a way to release oneself from the situations of today, rewriting the saying ‘one step at a time’ to ‘one snip at a time’.
Paper: represents constant debt, bills and loans in the mail, media becoming overwhelming and getting everywhere.
What did I do with the space?
I just played around with the rope and let it go where it fell on the chair and it turned out to look like a spider’s web.
So I thought what a spider’s web means to me:
- Strong
- Attachment
- Resourceful
- Entrapment
- Silky
- Invisible
- Beautiful
- Entangling
- Stuck
- Versatile
- Delicate
- Sustainability
These words relate to the good and the bad of what a young adult can be and do if given the chance.
The piece shows there is a problem to be solved and when you accidentally walk into a spider’s web your instinctive response is to get the heck out of it! So that’s what I felt when performing in the space with the entangled rope and string around me. I felt very pressured to get out especially as initially I went a little crazy with the string whilst wrapping it around me and the chair; this caused me to panic and feel a little claustrophobic with the mess I had got myself into. This was in fact, a blessing in disguise as it became the development of the beginning of my piece. I remember the feeling of anxiety and being trapped when the news of the increased rate of student loans came out in 2010. By remembering this reaction, I had an intuitive response to help the audience and myself understand that feeling of anxiety by transforming it into a physical representation and, to make the message clear, I will produce a new report soundscape.
By the way,with the chairs and tables, my first thoughts were that it resembled a ‘mind palace’ ; this term is used in the popular BBC drama Sherlock starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman. The origins of the ‘mind palace’ came from Cicero who called it the “Method of Loci” (Sachs, 2016) this is “the journey method” (Sachs, 2016) through the memory by training it.
This method “was invented more than 2000 years ago” (Sachs, 2016) and was used by the Greeks as well as the Romans “to memorize and give speeches that could last for hours” (Sachs, 2016). It worked because the speaker “mentally placed the key points of their speech in locations along a familiar route through their city or palace” (Sachs, 2016) so they can visualise the particular place and remember the relationship to the point that they travelled to. They went through their mind palace as though it is a treasure hunt of sorts, “and in each location retrieved the item representing the next key point they wanted to talk about” (Sachs, 2016).
My piece will represent a very messed up, disorganised and confused mind that needs a good tidy up so it can have a fresh start on everything that is happening. By applying the ‘Method of Loci’ my piece will have this sort of ‘treasure hunt’ idea by exploring the news and events that have changed the lives of young adults in the UK.
Work cited: Sachs, H. (2016) Memory Palaces and the Method of Loci. [online] Germany: remebereverything.org. Available from: http://remembereverything.org/memory-palace-the-method-of-loci/ [Accessed on 15 April 2016].