Experiments

What would you say to them if they were here now?

As our group want to explore vulnerability on society intimacy is an element which can take its place in our performance as you can become vulnerable when exposing intimacy. What makes a performance intimate? This is a question asked by many performers. Can an intimate performance happen with a big audience? There are many ways to explore intimacy in performance, and this is exactly what we did in one of the workshops at university.

The questions explored when exploring the notion of intimacy in performance, does it give the performance a sense of honesty? Are the audience more honest when it’s just a one to one performance? I chose to do a one to one performance in the workshop exploring loss; this is a subject very close to my heart as I have been through loss a lot since I was very young and find this subject very intimate for me. Letting people know into my mind when exploring loss and letting them know how I experience it.  Maria Chatzichichristodoulou and Rachel Zerihan describe intimacy as,

“Intimacy enables two sentient beings, who feel comfortable enough with each other on an emotional and/or physical level, to reveal something about themselves and connect in some form of meaningful exchange”
(2012, p. 1).
Taking this into account I devised a one to one performance with 5 minute slots. Before I started the performance I asked the spectator to think about this question through out the performance, “if you were to see a relative that died now, what would you say to them?”  In front of me I had two pieces of paper which had numbers on it, all the audience had to do was choose one and I would describe in detail how one of my relatives died in detail and what I would say to them if they were here now. The two people I chose to talk about in my performance was my little sister that died and my nana, two very close people who died very differently, one from cancer and one from meningitis. Letting the audience into my mind left me feeling very vulnerable, letting them see me breakdown I feel was quite intimate.  Relating back to what Chatzichichristodoulou and Zerihan said “to reveal something about themselves and connect in some form of meaningful exchange” (2012, p.1) I asked the spectator to write down what they would say to a certain relative if they where here now and told them they could take it away or let me read. 50% of the people that came took it away and the other let me read it. The audiences reaction to my performance was different every time, some cried, some just stared and some showed emotion towards me and wanted to hug me. I feel I got an honest reaction from everyone cause I had such a variety of reactions.

This experience really helped me in relation to my group’s performance as it; let me explore vulnerability and intimacy in a different way. Instead of exploring intimacy of the body I exposed my mind to other people, some who I didn’t know well enough to tell. This made my relationships closer to the people who heard.

 

Chatzichichristodoulou, Maria and Zerihan, Rachel (2012) Intimacy Across Visceral and Digital Performance, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

We Invite an Audience

For our second experiment, we invited an audience to join us in looking at peoples perceptions of self. The group exposed themselves at varying stages of nakedness and drew on themselves the changes they would make to their body if they could create a perfect version of their form. We then stood in a line, with our eyes closed, and asked the ‘audience’ to graduate down the line, drawing on the changes they would make to each person. The most interesting thing we found was that everyone stuck to the pre drawn lines of each person when making their changes, and later described that choice as reluctance to offend people. Despite the additions being completely anonymous, the audience explained that they felt a sense of exposure and empathy when asked to complete the task, and felt they would be judged on their decisions. This relates to the sense of shame mentioned in an earlier blog, and a quote from Brené Browns’ speech entitled The Power of Vulnerability;

‘…shame is really easily understood as the fear of disconnection: Is there something

about me that, if other people know it or see it, that I won’t be worthy of connection?’ (TED 2011)

The group linked this idea with our notion of vulnerability, in that the most basic reason people feel vulnerable is because they are ashamed of themselves, and afraid of other people’s perception of them. We therefore found it interesting that the audience experienced this same apprehension of honesty or exposure when asked to complete a set task. This furthered our interest in the relationship between the performer and the audience, and has also increased our curiosity in the ability to make the audience empathise with us as performers, to the extent that they can fully experience the same emotions (vulnerability, shame etc.) as the group.

TED (2011) The Power of Vulnerability [online video] available from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCvmsMzlF7o  [accessed 31 October 2013].

Testing our Vulnerability and Intimacy levels

Live art, exhibition and installation, are all things that I want our piece to inhabit. Much like the ‘happenings’ that began in the 1950’s in New York, I want our piece to combine elements of theatre and visual art with sufficient space for spontaneity. To achieve this we are culminating our performance through continuous practical research, learning about the ‘self’ while testing vulnerability and exposure levels of the group, through the confusion of the audience performer role.

Portraying documentation as art is something that intrigues the group because of its link to life. Documentation art can be viewed as similar to life, because essentially both are  a pure activity that does not lead to an end result. The lack of an end result links to the work of Higgins and his theory of how artwork connects to what is understood compared to what is not ‘The concept is understood better by what it is not, rather than the what it is’ (Kaye, 2008, P.25), much like Higgins and Newling our piece is more focused upon conceptual art, as the group is more focused upon the ideas presented compared to the finished article.

As a group we are carrying out numerous experiments, firstly testing our levels of vulnerability through exposure but also experimenting with the vulnerability levels of any audience members we may encounter. Our first experiment was one which involved the group, experimenting with how exposed physically and mentally we could become before our own vulnerability took over, this for me also experimented with the role intimacy has within performance and society. “Intimacy enables two sentiment beings, who feel comfortable enough with each other on an emotional and/or physical level, to reveal something about themselves and connect in some form of meaningful exchange” (Smith, 2007, p.1.) I feel that as a group of girls who knew each other it was much easier to reach a state of ‘extreme’ vulnerability due to the comfortable environment. However, when moving this idea to our performance space we may become subject to hurtful reactions from onlookers. Therefore the exposure and vulnerability encountered will be a practice of a direct action, highlighting the idea of the psyche with society and the self and how we communicate with the world. For the second half of this experiment we  analysed our personal vulnerability through a group conversation of how we felt whilst ‘performing’, this consequently allowed the group to reach a mental intimacy as ‘intimacy also involves an aspiration for a narrative about something shared, a story about both oneself and others (Smith, 2007, p.1).

Throughout the performance we want to capture the tension between performance and vulnerability, therefore choosing the space we have was key in the creation of Nuditate. I felt that a performance containing exposure within a Theatre is only exposure to a certain extent, as it is set in the context of a performance. Therefore for my second experiment i wanted to test intimacy and the boundaries this has.  For this piece i experimented and performed in a shower room, the close proximity of the space allowed for much more intimacy and the repetitive question of ‘touch me again somewhere else’  experimented with the loss of  the performer’s power when being intimate versus the power the audience member has when creating intimacy. The creation of intimacy however also lead to a sense of vulnerability, this was witnessed in a couple of audience members due to the intense nature of the question.

The two experiments which we have undertaken so far, have tested my levels of vulnerability but within the context of intimacy and this is something I want to achieve within the final performance through the use of the body as ‘language is not and cannot express what it seeks to describe – an admission of the struggle in everyday life’ (Etchells, 1999, p.102.)  I want to achieve a simplified performance through the use of personal vulnerability, experimenting with the self but allowing the audience to be involved with the piece so as not to create an indulgent personal experiment.

 

 

 

contemp 1 contemp 2

The above photos indicate the intimacy of the touch me experiment, and the vulnerable nature which was highlighted through the exposure of the body and self.

 

Works cited

Etchells, T (1999) Certain Fragments: Contemporary performance and forced entertainment, London and New York: Routledge

Kaye, N. (2008). Site-specific art. London: Routledge.

Smith, C. (2007). Spank (at Intimacy: across visceral and digital performance).

We Decide to Practice

Throughout our first few meetings as a group, we realised that when we thought about what made us feel vulnerable, we all made a direct link with exposure. This relates to both the exposure of our mental state (e.g. our opinions, our past, our secrets etc.) and physical exposure of our form.

It was decided that as a group of self conscious twenty something year olds, it would take some persuading for us to expose ourselves, both mentally and physically, and so we decided to do a number of experiments that will, eventually, form a large part of our piece. Our first experiment will be performed within the group, where we will play both the part of performer and audience, and we have decided to meet to test our initial levels of comfort with other members of the group. We will do this by firstly revealing ourselves physically, in the simple act of removing our clothes in front of the group, and then by exposing ourselves mentally, for which we will record an intimate conversation, or ‘heart to heart’ about our biggest insecurities, flaws and occasions on which we have felt most vulnerable. The recording will be edited and used as part of the audio background for our final performance.

 We decided that as a group we shared a mutual interest of blurring the lines between performer and audience, and this will form the base of many of our experiments. Whilst researching this idea, we looked at a lot of work by Marina Abramovic. Whilst studying Abramovic for previous modules, we have learnt that she often uses her pieces to explore the relationship between audience and performer, so for this piece, I looked extensively at Rhythm 0 and The Artist is Present, two of her works in which the distinction between audience and performer became so blurred it ceased to exist. The Artist is Present is particularly relevant to our piece as Abramovic doesn’t ask the audience to do anything in particular, and yet the entire performance relies on the audience member, and for a short period of time they were both occupying the space as performers, each of equal importance.

Another artist I found influential in my input towards the piece was Negin Vaziri, in particular her piece entitled Eternity Woman, described as an installation ‘…following the outlines of a female body and the enviroment in which it exists.’ (Vaziri, 2010) Vaziri embraces feminity throughout her work, yet is not aiming to portray the female form in a sexual manner, a theme which I feel is important to our piece.

Vaziri, N. (2010) Installations. [online] Available from http://www.neginvaziri.com/www.neginvaziri.com/INSTALLATION/INSTALLATION.html [Accessed  19 October 2013]