Exploring the dynamics and layers of performance is a tough job to do, and as drama students we each have faced the challenge of interpreting performances that have been specifically designed to be interpretive! Luckily for us we are trained with the skill to identify what works and what doesn’t, or so we think. The Defying Gravity group stumbled, broken limbed into a new process of exploration with the visually stimulating, headache inducing glow-in-the-dark (GID) idea developed through visual means of illusion. What we found was another story, if ever one considers physical movement with paint, just remember it’s messy. Not just in the ‘It’ll get all over my clothes and in my hair’ messiness, but also performative, it is sloppy, gruesome and just too darn difficult to reproduce on a non-existent budget. What works for The Blue Man Group, does not work for four Lincoln-based drama students. But we soldiered on, not willing to fall at the first hurdle (especially given that we had countless more to leap), and developed numerous ways in which we could explore and create this image. With the expulsion of any consideration towards a narrative, we faced the challenge of making the GID paint performative and intriguing to observe, enter the music. Watching a physical body react and blend to the rhythm and intracacies of music is stimulating and (when done well) completely engrosses an observer into a new world, a visual story to be explored and interpreted. The group considered this an interesting way in which to challenge the force of gravity, incorporating the muscular awareness through means of Pilates, the movement of the body would then be extended through the use of the GID paint, to further the removal of gravity by the force exerted behind the movement. Essentially, paint flying everywhere in the dark, in some stimulating, psychedelic trip for the observer to witness with the backdrop of music accompanying the development of a visual story. And yet, what was a simplistic exploration morphed, into a sloppy trifle as each layer was added to it. We had movement against gravity, check. We had paint, check. We had music to form response, check. We crashed and burned, check. The numerous layering of artistic concepts made us lose sight of the foundation for the idea, and as a result we suffered with poor feedback, specifically for the choices in music. This isn’t to say that music in performance does not work, but the relativity of the music in regard to the performance is key, and if not executed with clear conceptual understanding of its implementation what you’re left with is a performance lost within the misplacement of a heavy bass line and unnecessary lyrical accompaniment. Luckily, we have found a means to strip back the layers of the mismatched performance elements and have rediscovered that we had not completely strayed from our group aim; to defy gravity. There is movement, and we have been fortunate to challenge the negative qualities of the performance pieces at the stage we have, allowing us to explore the dynamics of our new performance concept. So, what did we learn from this process? Well, in this case: Music? Nay.