Have you ever wondered what a young adult’s mind looks like nowadays?
Well it’s your lucky day because you can experience it today!
A young adult is captured and forced to do a self evaluation in their own mind. They are trapped, there is no where to go, all they can hear is the criticism about themselves and what it is like nationally to be a young adult in this current economic climate. This is how young adults feel they are portrayed and treated by the government and the media.
So this is the basis of my set. It was done on 12th May and was based in the alcove, with a table and chair and a basic floor light however, soon enough the whole space will become littered with paper, string and rope.
We used scaffolding as the frame for the rope. Looking back at my final design, the piece only used vertical lines to replicate bars but I decided this wasn’t going to be visionally stimulating and would look clumsy as well.
I chose to have a spider web effect which would also double up to replicate how electro neurons appear in the brain:
This shows the connection of all pieces of media and thoughts but physicalized in rope and string.
I used weaving to create the web like structure and had to teach the techies how to weave; this system was more effective than the one we used previously which was too complicated and difficult to manage. By tying the rope onto one end and threading it through made it work quicker and more efficiently; it also gave me more room to be imaginative.
The set could be likened to an art installation as I believe it evoked a similar feeling to that of the powerful and thought provoking piece by Marina Abramovic entitled Balkan Baroque. Her piece was a statement about her country of Serbia which she felt did not exist following the Yugoslavian wars. “It involved her scrubbing clean 1,500 cow bones six hours a day for four days and weeping as she sang songs and told stories from her native country” (O’Hagen, 2010). This was all visual, there was no narrative just the audience’s interpretation of her pain and agony when cleaning the horrific past she endured with her mother and father and how she was treated.
(The Guardian, 2010)
I feel my set has the same sense of drama and visual protest and imagery where it makes you stop and think but not to the same level as Balkan Baroque.
When the webbing was done we worked on the lights where a floor light was used.
This was a great source of light because it gave a harshness to the set and when a performer steps in it, it is though that are being interrogated because there is a piecing the light directly on the performer’s face. It gives great use of shadows as well when it comes to presenting a troubled worried mind as though the mind is ongoing with strings attached and nowhere to go.
When it came today the importance was the lighting which I have done earlier:
Blackout
A grey hard edge light snaps on before the sound starts
At 15 secs a pulsing light starts and gets stronger until 1:00 hits on the soundscape (or before it becomes a health issue).
Then the use of blackouts in pulse like rhythm that snaps on light until the soundscape hits 1:30.
A very slowly fade in back into a sand tone yellow lighting which will be sustained throughout the piece.
When the ‘God save our Queen’ music is over, the Cameron speech spec of blue and red comes on until 3:42
Then back to the yellow colour.
Yellow fades slowly into a flat white at 4:30
At 4:90 it starts to flicker back to the yellow shade where it sticks at 5:10
A strobe flickers into a LED white at 7:00
As the character starts to clean up the space at around 9:00 fade very slowly to blackout.
Lights fades back up at 10:00 to discover the character in the audience’s space.
Final blackout
This was set up ready for the show for tomorrow.
This is the final look until the floor becomes just paper in and around the alcove and all the other props.
Work cited:
O’Haggan, S (2010) Interview: Marina Abramović London: The Guardian. Available from https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2010/oct/03/interview-marina-abramovic-performance-artist [accessed 17th May 2016].
I decided the best way to do my performance is not to do it in a narrative way because the topic is not a box standard one; it’s potentially affecting many young adults who want to help make the world a better place but can’t because they are burdened with so much debt. I returned to the book Creating Solo Performance and found a section where it helps with the foundation of the piece. This is what it said, “If you are not doing a narrative piece, and it can be a useful task to set goals for yourself as a performer.” (Bruno and Dixon, 2015, 97) So that’s what I’m going to do; by answering the questions given on the page, to set goals and set a promise of what I will approach within my piece:
What are you trying to do?
To explore the situation of what young adults are going through when saddled with debt as they embark on their financial future by making people aware of it and acting upon it.
Why?
Because this issue affects many young people who are trying to improve their lives but are thwarted because of a lack of trust, the possibility of a corrupt future and debt up to our ears. Although this is the problem, students and some people have been affected in one way or another however, it can be different for anyone.
So I am trying to let my performance be open to interpretation as I want it to be a piece which is relatable to every experience that the audience have had, find areas/ parts of the performance where they connect and feel a sense of release by watching it being performed and be made aware that every young adult feels the same.
How are you going to do this?
As a piece that is very visual with a simple acting and a non-linear narrative so it acts like a thought of the mind rather than a performance.
What do you hope to achieve by doing this?
By using a soundscape of news reports that impact on me and other students/ young adults and a set that is sufficiently artistic, I hope to fire the audience’s imagination so they can work with the piece and tap into their feelings, memories and thoughts on the matter to support it and highlight it.
Now I have set my goals and achievements I must be sure it is clear to the reader and easy to interpret for each individual in the audience.
Work cited:
Bruno, S. and Dixon, L. (2015) Creating Solo Performance. London: Routledge.
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:
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].
As a Young Adult, I feel I have a duty to create this performance because it becomes an outlet and I am secure in the knowledge that there are people who are listening.
The essence of the book Creating Solo Performance is to encourage the performer not to work from a script but to be “thinking in terms of source documents instead of scripts” (Bruno and Dixon, 2015, 25). The reasoning for this is that most actors prefer to be led by “traditional script formats or even words” (Bruno and Dixon, 2015, 25); my preference however, is to stay away from pieces that have been written for young adults so my work is bespoke and not influenced by other.
I have made a point of studying artists who, in my view, have a style that complements or harmonises with mine and will therefore inspire me to produce clear and simplistic work.
The artists I have specifically looked at for their style and presentation are:
Jacques Lecoq
Yiannish Papas
Jacques Lecoq
Lecoq is one of the major exponents of physical theatre and his methods are all about using the power of body language to communicate expression and emotion. He believed that acting could transcend language and that the audience could still mentally interpret the actor’s actions without having to use dialogue.
After reading his book The Moving Body (Le Corps Poetique): Teaching Creative Theatre, the sections that appealed to me and prompted me to progress with my performance are:
Silence before Words
Lecoq’s opening observations are that “we approach improvisation through psychological replay” (Lecoq, 2000, 29). This is very true since the stimuli always come through the experience of the human body so, when working on my piece, I based it on recent events in my life and those of fellow young adults. By “reviving lived experiences in the simplest possible way” (Lecoq, 2000, 29) I was able to create a “theatrical dimension” by shaping an improvisation for spectators, using rhythm, tempo, space and form” (Lecoq, 2000, 29).
What I found most interesting and very informative was that my style of work and that of Lecoq’s both agree that “any human relationship [has] two major zones of silence emerge: before and after speech” (Lecoq, 2000, 29). As a result, in my performance I am exploring:
My work focuses on the way the ‘Millennial’ generation is represented by the press and the government as being ‘lazy’, ‘unsociable’ ‘ignorant’ and ‘ungrateful’. These views are particularly difficult to ignore at this moment in time and exacerbated by the debt students leave university with and the increased unemployment amongst young adults in the UK. I have therefore been exploring the ‘two silences’ whereby neither side is directly communicating with each other but, they are ‘talking’ to the media who are then putting their own slant on the information they receive as they see fit.
So what happens if the “two ways out of this silence: speech or action” (Lecoq, 2000, 30) are disturbed or one is only used by the actor and the other used as a source in the performance?
I intend to explore going through the motions using Lecoq’s work by performing a “gesture before having found the sensation which motivates it” ie speech (Lecoq, 2000, 32).
The Fundamental Journey
I have mainly focused my work on “all the movements finding their reflection in emotional feelings” (Lecoq, 2000, 42) As the performer must only use one of their communication factors which is movement, I want to “construct a language” by using movement.
The Body of Words
These are the quotes that I need to ignore in my performance and replace with my fragmented words and a lot more movement.
“Words are approached through verbs, bearers of action, and through nouns which represent a designated object” (Lecoq, 2000, 50)
“We consider words as living organisms and this we search for the body of words.” (Lecoq, 2000, 50)
“For this we have to choose words which provide a real physical dynamic.” (Lecoq, 2000, 50)
Level of Acting
One of Lecoq’s most well-known and popular practises is the ‘neutral mask’ whereby the body’s movement are so powerful that they replace the need to use language and dialogue thus the actions really do speak louder than the words.
The mask cancels the need to use facial expressions as these “[open] up a space for the feelings and emotions which go along with these movements” (Lecoq, 2000, 59). Because speech will not feature very much in my performance, I will need to use my body and its movement as an outlet by “filtering out the complexities of psychological viewpoint and imposing guiding attitudes on the whole body” (Lecoq, 2000, 54).
Why I am using this technique?
“Who wears an expressive mask reaches an essential dimension of dramatic playing, unveiling the whole body and experiences an emotional and expressive intensity” (Lecoq, 2000, 54)
This quote suggests to me that if I make my piece a very physical and open performance, the audience will be able to interpret it mentally. If, as a performer, I can make “the character then arise out of the form” (Lecoq, 2000, 45) I will have succeeded in creating an illusion in the audience’s mind by replacing language and dialogue and communicating with them through the physicality of my body.
Work Cited:
Bruno, S. and Dixon, L. (2015) Creating Solo Performance. London: Routledge.
Lecoq, J. (2000) The Moving Body: Teaching Creative Theatre. 3rd edition. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Media.
