As we ended our lecture today by conversing about our early impressions of site specific performance, some fascinating points regarding the practices of the subject were addressed. One particular debate caught my attention, as a member of my group was talking to another one of our peers in regards to stripping people down to their bare essentials in an attempt to discover if there is more underneath, or if there is only a blank canvas. This relates to a certain practitioner that introduced me to site specific, who is regarded by some as the Grandmother of performance art, Marina Abramovic. Her infamous works such as ‘Imponderabilia’, ‘Rhythm 2’, ‘Rhythm 0’, and one of her more recent pieces ‘The Artist is Present’ elicit some unique reactions from her audience members. In ‘Rhythm 0’ Abramovic was able to invoke violent reactions, from people cutting her to trying to shoot her. Whereas ‘The Artist is Present’ caused more emotional outbursts such as crying or even proposing to Abramovic. In this respect Abramovic is a great source of inspiration to me as my group is very interested in finding out our audience’s reaction to the questionable ethics of our piece, and we hope to strike as much of an emotional cord as Abramovic has in her work.

Whilst looking back on what we have learnt over the course so far, what particularly stuck out for me was the idea of the pre-performance, performance and post-performance and how the audience is used. Audience involvement is a really key thing we as we want strong engagement in every element of our performance. One part of our performance we are exploring at the moment is experimenting with the use of different sounds and rhythms to create for the audience. Through using different utensils and everyday objects, to using our voices we are exploring different ways in which sound travels and a particular focus on listening to the sounds around us. A specific influence was Cathy Berberian’s ‘Stripsody’.

Available at: http://sparksinelectricaljelly.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/berberian-sound-studio-and-cathy.html (Accessed 20th March)

This snippet of the piece shows how the traditional notation on the stave is replaced with different onomatopoeic sounds which create a story for the audience. A splash of humour is also brought to the performance through the different sounds made through the voice and this really struck a chord with us, especially for audiences with children in. Another influence that we explored what John Cage with his piece ‘4’33’ in which the piece is 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence, and that is his performance. This piece has quite indefinitely split opinions but personally I feel that it makes the audience listen more to the sound around them and notice that more, which is also what we want to incorporate in our piece.

When we think of time and space, we think of them as two separate components, the link between which is never really clear. We seem to forget that the house that we live in now, was probably not around 100 years ago. When we think of a minute, we never really begin to understand how much can be done in such a short space of time. Films such as run Lola run come into mind, about a girl who keeps repeating the same time line over and over again changing what happens in that time to change the outcome at the end. We begin to think of how this kind of idea can be applied to performances that we are working on at the present.

In our performance, we are focusing on the ideas of Light and Sound. During our process we have been thinking, in particular when creating our sound performance, about creating a piece which is influenced by 4.33 a piece of music created by John Cage. In this piece he plays no music instead he attunes the audiences ears to the sounds around them as a type of music. We have been experimenting with this idea in our performance, along with ideas influenced by the music of Catherine Berberian in particular her piece called Stripsody. With the idea of using everyday sounds to create a sound-scape of music, we have taken both these ideas and created a piece of performance where we copy the noises that the audience make during the silence that we create. This performance however will change in every space we use, as we will in turn have a different audience, time also plays into our performance of the sound-scape, as the longer we make our performance, the more audience members will begin to realise what we are doing, hopefully creating a comedic effect.

I have been thinking about audience participation, in terms of how comfortable an audience can become with a performance that they are willing to take part or fully throw themselves into the experience. Take Annie Sprinkles Post Porn Modernist, in which Sprinkles sat on a stage and let people come and look into her vagina through a tube with a light on. They would say hello, take a look and then move on. Is that only one type of audience though? A very brave type, that only hear about this kind of theatre because they are looking for it?

If you got 20 people just off the street, pretty much like we are going to do at the festival, how willing will they be to take part? After we show every extract of our performance and how we are building and creating them, it always comes back to the same thing, ‘how is the audience going to react?’. Of course with our groups some require more audience interaction than others, but just looking at our group, how will they react? Will they be perfectly comfortable with scrutinizing the human form so much? To decide what is right and wrong in how people act. We are trying to make people catch themselves thinking this kind of thing and questioning if it’s right. The world we live in now is obsessed with cosmetics and how we look. Our performance is just the extreme of what’s already happening.

Henri Lefebvre thinks anything can have a rhythm including our bodies, ‘our biological rhythms of sleep, hunger and thirst, excretion and so on are more and more conditioned by the social environment and our working lives.We train ourselves, and are trained, to behave in a number of ways.’ Even cities can have rhythms for example the traffic lights have a sequence to follow. Noises in a city can be like a musical score. Everybody has their own individual rhythms.This relates to our performance as in our performance we are responding to sound. Originally we chose quite contemporary music for our performance to respond to however we realise now that we don’t have to use conventional styles of music to respond to we could even just use sounds like how the sounds of a city can make a musical score.