Half A Person: My Life As Told By The Smiths is the first solo performance, other than Stand Up Comedy, that I have watched as a live performance. I was unsure what to expect and anxious as to how personal the piece would feel.
I found the performer exactly as I had hoped. It was apparent that he was compeltely in the zone and his attention to detail was immaculate. His enunciation was on top form and his dialectic transitions were remarkable. I was completely blown away by his multiroling and did not once lose concentration from the piece.
The lighting was something I found particularly interesting. Within solo work, I am conscious of the performance being static but due to the lighting which I felt to direct the performer, I was able to see the story from many different angles, whilst also providing an interesting visual aspect.
The use of music was also something I admired. Incorporating live vocals to the piece ensured the audience were constantly refreshed with the pace of the story and allowed time to replay the goings on in their own time. I am sometimes conscious that bursting into song presents elements of awkwardness, however it fit the story perfectly and heightened the emotions within the piece.
I was pleasantly surprised by the imagation, fantastic script and energy the performance had and I am keen to borrow elements of the piece for my own performance.
Works Cited Image from Google Images. Google Image Search: Half a Person: My Life as told by the Smith’s. Online: https://www.google.co.uk/imghp?hl=en&tab=wi Accessed: Tuesday 26 February 2013.
My third and final performance idea as of yet is a combination of my two original ideas as well as incorporating a series of mini narratives that will either a) respond coherently to the initial stimuli or b) be in a non-linear format that will show a variety of elements that are personal to me while being reletive to any audience.
I have mentioned previously in discussions with my class that I am really interested in the idea of each audience member taking something different and personal from a performance and with this performance idea I think this is very achievable.
To begin the rehearsal process for this performance I plan to throw each of the narratives together and explore them as one. I am interested in finding a gesture from the fundamental narrative and reconstructing this to create a balanced relationship between each of the mini narratives.
In terms of how I will perform this I am unsure whether it will purely be a live show or whether this will also transmitted to a podcast where the audience are able to download and watch in their own time. Having the audience being able to view the piece at different times brings together the different opinions I hope the audience will have.
For the time being, I will be thinking about how I can experiment with the material I have and begin work on physicalising the mini narratives that I am eager to include.
Through in class discussion I began to think about jealousy. Feeling jealous of others, having others feel jealous of you, and how it can link to so many other emotions and how these can affect you. To experiment with this idea, I have used autobiographical material.
Being Jealous of Others
en I was 14, my Dad told me that he was having a baby with his new partner. At the time, they hadn’t been together very long and I was still adjusting to him being with someone other than my Mum. As soon as he told me I burst into tears. Too much was changing too quickly and I was scared that I wouldn’t come first anymore. I know this sounds utterly selfish, and I agree that it is, but for 14 years I had been my Daddy’s little girl, and for the past year, his only girl. It was hard enough knowing he loved someone new, let alone the thought of him having another child. I look back on it and laugh now, but I remember telling him that if he had another girl, he was sending it back. I was his daughter and he wasn’t having another one. Thankfully, they gave me a little brother but I know that if they were to have a girl, I wouldn’t love her any differently.
People Being Jealous of Me
When I was 18 and in my second year of college, I experienced a side of jealousy I had never experienced before. I was studying a BTEC National Diploma in Performing Arts and was on a course with 14 other girls, 12 of which hated me. You may think hate is too strong of a word, but they made my final year of college a living hell. 4 of the girls led the group and the other 8 followed. Though I had 2 ‘friends’ on the course, they would never stick up for me so much of the time I felt completely alone. On a daily basis I would encounter vicious words, pushing and shoving and even had chewing gum put in my hair. At 18 years old, I could not believe the immaturity of these girls. I never understood why I was so hated me until towards the end of the year when I admitted to myself that it must have been jealousy. I was in a happy relationship, I achieved Distinctions in almost every area of my course and I had been accepted into my first choice University. Though now it sounds like I am gloating, I can assure you I didn’t at the time. I was quiet and shy around them, only performing when I got on to the stage. I wasn’t going to pretend that I wasn’t good at what I did because I didn’t go to college to make friends, though it would have made my experience a lot more enjoyable. Looking at the girls today, I am able to smile. I am coming to the end of my degree, and the majority of them are jobless. I would say its karma, however I know that really it is just my hard work and determination and their lack of the two. Either way I am thankful for their jealousy as it may have given me stimuli for a solo performance.
The idea of incorporating jealousy within my performance interests me as the two stories above are very personal to me. I am also keen on looking into turning jealousy into envy and the fine line that this entails.
Being asked to produce a short autobiographical monologue led me to my first idea of performance. Due to the spectrum of solo performance being very large, at first sight I had no idea where my solo piece would end up. Even today, I am still debating a few ideas which may even all combine into one.
I wasn’t sure at first what to discuss in my monologue. I am only 21 years old, and in those 21 years, I struggled to pick something really significant that people would want to hear about. Then it came to me. The only thing I remebered that I thought may surprise my audience. I told the story of when I was almost snatched by a bald eagle. I can assure you that this is a true story, though ‘snatched’ may be a slight exaggeration. I was six years old at the time and with my family at a local park called Fritton Lake. I live in Norfolk, and at the time, this park was one of our best nearby attractions. Fritton Lake had everything. A giant playground that had a zipwire, a bird of prey show, a giant lake which you could canoe on and a pitch and put golf course. My Dad is a greenkeeper, so anytime we came across a golf course, we were always made to play a game. At six years old, I wasn’t too interested. So intstead, I decided that I would use my golf club to write my name in the bunker. So, there I was, minding my own business, making my name look really pretty in the sand when suddenly, my Dad comes running over to get me. I assumed he was going to tell me off because a) I wasn’t joining in, and b) he spends many of his working day raking bunkers because people like me decide to write silly words in them. However, he simply asked if I was okay, to which I replied, ‘Yes Daddy, I’m just playing’. He then said ‘Okay darling, just look behind you for a second’. And there it was. A giant bald eagle, literally a metre or two away from me. I was a small six year old and the bird It is safe to say that we didn’t finish the round of golf, and it put me off going back there for life.
The elements of this story I feel I could focus on in my performance is the size of the balf eagle in comparison with myself. I could then use this as a metaphor for fear, excitement and adrenaline and incorporate elements of these feelings into the story. I am unsure yet whether this is the path I will go down in terms of my final performance however the use of it for experimentation has been very useful.
“To be a performance artist, you have to hate theatre. Theatre is fake…The knife is not real, the blood is not real, and the emotions are not real. Performance is just the opposite: the knife is real, the blood is real, and the emotions are real” (O’Hagan, 2010).
The above quote comes from the mouth of Marina Abramovic, an idol in the world of Performance Art. Before studying this module, my interest of Performance Art was limited due to not coming across it as often as other performance types. It’s eccentricity and dedication seems to be too much for audiences who use theatre as a means for escape. It involves too much thinking, and therefore invites a specific audience that are comfortable with being involved in the performance. To some, this is ideal, however to others is too overwhelming. I also feel that Performance Art is not embraced in the same respect in England, particularly in comparrison with its appreciation in America. It is commonly unheard of to many which adds another aspect to putting people off.
I see Marina Abramovic an ideal performance artist to research in respect to her particular audience. In her forty+ year career, Abramovic says she has often dealt with “true reality” (O’Hagan, 2010) causing her both psychological and physical repercussions. She has stabbed herself in the hand with knives, lain naked on a cross of ice for a durational period and even allowed the public to prod, probe and abuse her body. Abramovic sees her audience to be as crucial to her performances as she is: “I test the limits of myself in order to transform myself. But I also take the energy from the audience and transform it. It goes back to them in a different way. A powerful performance will transform everyone in the room” (O’Hagan, 2010).
I often do not understand the physical extremities that Abramovic has put herself through, however her recent performance ‘The Artist is Present’ intrigued me with its difference to her earlier work. She describes this piece as “a pared-down, long durational piece that destroys the illusion of time” (O’Hagan, 2010). For seven hours a day, over the course of a month and a half, Abramovic sat on a wooden chair, mirroring anyone’s emotions who wish to sit opposite her. Though the performance is much less extreme than some of her work, the amount of psychological preporation required would have put enormous strain on Abramovic. “Physically, mentally, I have to prepare myself for a feat of endurance…I train the body and the mind. This is very hard: sleep, wake, drink, pee, exercise, sleep, wake and on and on. So even the not performing is intense” (O’Hagan, 2010).
Her family dynamic growing up was quite explosive. Her parents quarrelled constantly and Abramovic was often beaten by her Mother for supposedly showing off: “Everything in my childhood was about total sacrifice…This is why I have insane willpower. My body is now beginning to be falling apart but I will do it to the end. I don’t care. With me it is about whatever it takes” (O’Hagan, 2010). I propose Abramovic’s strict upbringing to have a large inpact on the extremity to much of her work.
Though looking purely at finished article of Abramovic’s work, she can be assumed crazy and her work perculiar, as true as this could be, she holds deep meaning behind each one of her performances in which she hopes others can relate too.
With specific relation to The Artist Is Present I am intrigued by the notion of ‘celebrity’. Abramovic herself is famously known and adored by thousands of people. With this in mind, the audience of The Artist Is Present were therefore largely art fanatics going more to experience being so close to Marina than to participate purely for the sake of the performance. It is her celebrity status that attracts so many people to her work to which I would be interested to see The Artist Is Present taken on by an unknown artist and whether someone unknown would receive the same response.
Works Cited Abramovic, Marina. (2010). The Artist Is Present Official Trailer HBO. Online: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jY3VwmiT3j4 Accessed: Sunday 10 February 2013.
Abramovic, Marina. (2012). Marina Abramovic: Last Day (May 31, 2012) The Artist Is Present. Online: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ts66t9muFfQ Accessed: Sunday 10 February 2013.
O’Hagan, Sean. (2010). An Interview with Marina Abramovic. In: The Guardian, The Observer. Accessed: 27/01/13
