When thinking about site specific performance, you first have to think what a site is, as Nick Kaye suggests “What is a site?Is it a space, a place, a symbol or a set of rules? Is it a memory, a stage, a story or a mystery? Is it a territory, a stronghold, an identity or a tenancy? Is it a text? A past? A future? An objective fact or a ‘shifting bundle of mirrors’? To quote the situationists: ‘under the pavement, a beach.’(Kaye, N. (2008) Site Specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation. Routledge: London.) So with this in mind lets simplify it and look at how to define a place and space, Martin Heidegger refers to it as ” space is a nowhere concept, place is something we have constructed from space to mean something” with this in mind, it is time to relate it to my site which in my case in two places, one being shops in Grantham during the Gravity Fields Festival which is a science festival which is mainly dedicated to Sir Isaac Newton which has influenced my piece which focuses on Newton’s Law of Gravity and the second site is Lincoln Performing Arts Centre in Studio X on 10th May 2014. Here is two images that show the different spaces
with the idea of the two sites through exploring the concept of nowhere as being now here it brings me to think about the shops within Grantham, we may be in the middle of nowhere familiar but we are here in the now, so our performance will be appropriate to the here and now of the time such as Gravity Fields itself. Through looking into the space and thinking about ideas regarding our theme which is Newtonian theory regarding gravity we have come up with the idea of the way that gravity slowing deteriorates the body during endurance tasks, my piece involves me holding a two litre bottle with different parts of my body and trying to see how long I can sustain this exercise, there are 4 different exercises that show how different muscle groups are affected. This piece will be a duration piece which I believe will allow our performance to reach our full potential as this will allow the audience to see how the body weakens over time, and how different muscle groups respond to the strain they are undertaking. In addition to this I have researched about how being in space effects the body and how it is affected when there is a sense of weightlessness. The main way that gravity affects humans is that it keeps us grounded to the earth. If we did not have any gravity on earth we would be floating around and probably would not be able to survive the way we do now. Gravity affects human beings by telling our bodies how strong they need to be to accomplish work. Gravity also helps to regulate blood pressure, cardiovascular function, and other bodily organs. When humans go into space where there is less gravity, they experience muscle and bone loss, and loss of cardiovascular capacity. As I believe that site specific is about breaking the boundaries of the traditional concept of theatre that’s one of the reason that wanted the audience to be able to leave when they want to and not to feel trapped within the performance. As our piece is duration we do expect the audience to change frequently and this is a good way to show that our boundaries are removed as the audience can decide how long they stay for and how they perceive the piece.
Analysis of Process
To begin my process I began to look at videos with the idea of a shop like space, and thought it would be a good way of looking at the space and working with it. I like the idea of having the audience look through a window, as it gives the audience a sense of control, they decide how long they watch for. Also it allows the audience to be looking into the action and allows them to have a critical view on it, just like everyday life whilst shopping, everyone criticises everyone due to the choices they make with their purchases. Also I thought of the idea of consumption and thought of therapy as a singular word instead of being joint with retail, I have looked at how addiction consumes a person. Hi, so this week we started group formations. I am in a group that is focusing around the idea of Newton Law of Gravity and pushing the boundaries of performance. Though at first I was reluctant about the idea, from researching ways to push the boundaries of performance such as showing anti- gravity by the use of mirrors, I have found myself excited about the project. There are many ways to push the boundaries of performance, in our case we have discussed the idea of having items stuck to walls and ceilings to symbolise the idea of gravitational pull. We have discussed the use of projection and mirrors to make what could seem impossible i.e. performing on the ceiling or wall possible. The practitioner Mike Pearson, discusses the relationship between archaeology and performance. He states that for the performer it is a ‘series of physical, sensual and extra-daily experiences as alterations of perception and life strategies which may or may not be made explicit to the spectator, as sequences of tension, relaxation, and acceleration, changes of consequence and innovation.’
So last night I watched a performance at LPAC called Caramel this gave me so many ideas regarding aspects of movement that can be used within our piece. The performance was based around the idea of what choreography would taste like. This has allowed me to explore the idea of synaesthesia what would emotion look like, or feel like or even smell like. The aspect that our group has chosen to focus on is how emotion can be seen via colours. This brings me onto my next point about the art of Rasa which is associated with Indian dance. Each different element within the Rasa have a set colour;
Love and Attractiveness are represented by light green
Laughter, mirth and comedy represented by white
Fury represented by red
Compassion and tragedy represented by grey
Disgust represented by the colour blue
Horror and terror represented by the colour black
Heroic is represented by a golden colour
Wonder and amazement represented by yellow
Peace is represented by white
[Archive.org. 2014. Natya Shastra of Bharata Muni Volume 2: Bharata Muni: Free Download & Streaming: Internet Archive. [Online] Available at: https://archive.org/details/NatyaShastraOfBharataMuniVolume2 [Accessed: 13 Mar 2014].
My key practitioner that has influenced the piece is Jerzy Grotowski and his invention of ‘Laboratory Theatre’ This idea emphasized the essential element of any theatre event: the intensified participation of actors and spectators in a shared space, shaped anew for each meeting between them. This idea emphasized the essential element of any theatre event: the intensified participation of actors and spectators in a shared space, shaped anew for each meeting between them. This style of theatre had a very clinical feel and I believe this is what allowed us to create the idea related to our site which is the science festival and they have a theme surrounding laboratories and the creation of Frankenstein. This relates to our idea of wanting our piece to be in the style of Grotowski and his way of clinical minimalistic style of theatre. Some of Grotowski principles have allowed me to find aspects to relate to my performance such as the idea he had which consists of the notion that theatre doesn’t need music to accompany the plot or that theatre doesn’t need text to be a performance. Furthermore Grotowski believed that the performer’s voice and body needed to be central to the performance. Another key element to my process is Sir Isaac Newton as our site is the Gravity Fields Festival which is very Newtonian influenced and as our theme of our performance is based around his ideas regarding gravity, this was a key element to focus on as we went throughout our performance process. Newton’s law of gravity is the notion of that any two in the universe attract each other with a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. This is a general physical law derived from empirical observations by what Isaac Newton called induction. (Isaac Newton: “In [experimental] philosophy particular propositions are inferred from the phenomena and afterwards rendered general by induction”: “Principia“, Book 3, General Scholium, at p.392 in Volume 2 of Andrew Motte’s English translation published 1729.)
- F is the force between the masses,
- G is the gravitational constant,
- m1 is the first mass,
- m2 is the second mass, and
- r is the distance between the centres of the masses.
(Proposition 75, Theorem 35: p.956 – I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman, translators: Isaac Newton, The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. Preceded by A Guide to Newton’s Principia, by I. Bernard Cohen. University of California Press 1999 ISBN 0-520-08816-6 ISBN 0-520-08817-4)
Through this notion of bodies attracting each other I research about different types of attraction such as physical attraction, and the definition that I discovered from researching this was: “Physical attractiveness is the degree to which a person’s physical traits are considered aesthetically pleasing or beautiful. The term often implies sexual attractiveness or desirability.” (Wikipedia, 2014) Another aspect of gravity I have discovered is mass and weight I managed to find out what my weight was in newtons is 1120.9518503201634. Through this research it made me wonder does gravity affect the human body, through all the research I have done I came to the conclusion that the gravitational pull of the planets specifically earth does affect our lives greatly. When in the presence of gravity, 1. We don’t fly around uncontrollably, 2. We use our muscles to move around, 3. We get the body shape we have. When there is very little or no gravity, the weight of your body mass decreases, so there is less stress on your muscles and if you don’t constantly exercise, you lose them. This is also why many alien depictions show aliens with skinny body, because they have the minimal muscle mass because of space travel. When astronauts go on missions they have to work out routinely so that when they come back to earth they can withstand the conditions. They have treadmills, exercising elastics, they work better than actual weights because under low gravity even massive weights weight every little, but elastics can keep their elasticity, so if you tie it to something and pull, you’d get more exercise. We look the way we look because of gravity. When we’re constantly under the gravitational pull we’re working our muscles in every action we perform, which is why even an average person can have minimally buff biceps even without working out, because in a sense we’re constantly working out because of gravity.
To prepare us for the strenuous performance we have been using Pilates to warm ourselves up before a rehearsal. Pilates is an exercise system that focuses on stretching and strengthening the whole body to improve balance, muscle-strength, flexibility and posture. It was created by German-born Joseph Pilates in the early 1900s and incorporates elements of yoga, martial arts and Western forms of exercise.
My process through this experience of site specific performance has been a very difficult and challenging one, as my journey has been through many different turns, but this has allowed myself to know that within site specific, you as a performer has to be able to adapt to change. I have experienced these change in the aspect of due to our site changing from the shops in Grantham to Lincoln Performing Arts Centre. , I believe this will be well suited for our performance as we just need a black box nothing visual around us as our performance will create a visually pleasing experience. I have realised that through stripping back to the simplicity of an idea the true beauty comes through. The simplicity of physicality is the title that fits our performance perfectly.Through showing our work to the module leader, we have been told to strip back our idea and see the simplicity of how gravity reacts with the human body, suggestions that we were given was to see how gravity eventually restricts what the body can endure. So for example, having a member of our group lift another for a duration of time and to have the audience witness how the body slowly deteriorate under the strain. With these suggestions in mind I have been working on the idea of different activities/tasks that will show how gravity has an important part in how long the body can endure these activities/tasks. Gravity will win, but this will not be the complete focus of the performance. . Our other ideas have involved music but with a new idea we have decided to stay away from the music and have thought about using equipment like ECG and microphones and this would allow us to have the natural sounds around us and of the body as a soundtrack to the whole performance. I would be able to use live and videoed work and this will allow us to work in a post-performance aspect that we have always have wanted to put into our performance. I looked at the idea of live feed vs pre-recorded and I believe that live feed would work better as it gives our work authenticity and would allow us to have a sense of ownership on our individual pieces. Also we have spoken about the idea of pre- performance and post- performance and we like these elements and have thought for pre-performance we could record the noises we make within rehearsals, so the audience will get a performance that has already occurred but the audience is hearing it for the first time. In addition to this the idea of post-performance is to use a PowerPoint to show the previous times that we have achieved and the audience can see the times we are trying to smash each time, the PowerPoint will always be visible and will be used to document the times that will be achieved within the performance.
Performance Evaluation
So our performance is over, and even though our process has had many turns and ups and down I feel that our performance was very successful, one of my main worries was that the piece would be boring for an audience as they are just sitting and watching the actions unfold, but through audience feedback they mentioned that the performance was interesting because they were watching how the body was shaking and getting excited regarding each performer beating their times. I believe that the strengths of our performance was how focused we were as a group and how we set the performance space to fit in with our idea of clinical/laboratory style performance space which was supported by our research of Grotowski. Our weaknesses mainly were based of the fitness level, we trained occasionally with these tasks but rarely did a full day of the tasks so due to this we did not realise how bad our bodies would feel after a while of doing the tasks. My personal experience was after a while my body started to ache and I began to tire easily after a while, this aspect has allowed us to know how to prepare for our performance at the festival in September. Audience numbers for the performance was about 20/25 people throughout the day, the audience did not have any interaction with us but this was one of feedback notes that we should introduce a guest section within our performance as during the performance many people were like I wish I could of tried the tasks, so this is an adjustment that we will include at Gravity Fields. During set up on the day of our performance we were discussing that there are aspects of the site that we would of loved to include into our performance such as creating a part of the performance in the lift that leads up to Studio X within Lincoln Performing Arts Centre, this would gave the audience an insight into the performance before they watched the main section of the performance. In addition we discussed the idea of having a little bit of writing regarding our concept of gravity and what our performance is trying to show as this allows people to get an understanding of the aim of the performance. The layout of the space worked well as it allowed the audience to be able to see each performer clearly, also as there was always two performers performing at a time it allowed the audience to decide who they looked and when they looked at them. I believe we could have improved the final performance by having our idea sooner so we could polish it and think of every aspect that needs to be considered in order to have a professional polished performance. If I was going to alter anything of our performance it would be to make it look more professional such as having the stop watch projected on the wall instead of being on a IPad and also having more information about our performance as I feel people may have been confused of why we was doing our tasks, also I would make sure they we trained harder and did more warm ups as I feel I was not physically ready for this strenuous performance. Overall my experience with site specific performance has been stressful and challenging but very rewarding, I have thoroughly enjoyed myself within this experience and the idea of being able to performance in a non-traditional performance space has made me want to explore different sites and to think of ideas that are influenced by the sites.
Bibliography
Proposition 75, Theorem 35 (1999): p.956 – I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman, translators: Isaac Newton, The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. Preceded by A Guide to Newton’s Principia, by I. Bernard Cohen. University of California Press
Kaye, N. (2008) Site Specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation. Routledge: London.
Nhs.uk, (2014). A guide to Pilates – Live Well – NHS Choices. [Online] Available at: http://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/fitness/Pages/pilates.aspx [Accessed 14 May. 2014].
Isaac Newton: (1729.)”In [experimental] philosophy particular propositions are inferred from the phenomena and afterwards rendered general by induction”: “Principia“, Book 3, General Scholium, at p.392 in Volume 2 of Andrew Motte’s English translation
Wikipedia, (2014). Physical attractiveness. [Online] Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_attractiveness [Accessed 14 May. 2014].