As a group we have managed to develop many ideas, born from the simple concept of breaking the rules of gravity. Initial thoughts and ideas consisted predominantly of creating a room on the walls/ceiling of the shopping unit walls, exercising our bodies and pushing them to limits that will alter the reality of gravity e.g. sitting on a chair that is attached to the wall. Of course, we have to respect the space that we are occupying – whilst it would be very entertaining and visually stimulating, the incurred potential for damage is something that will need further exploration to ensure that we avoid breaking our space.
We have considered the numerous ways in which we can create the illusion of an alteration to the gravitational direction within the space, e.g. applying mirrored paper to the walls. By doing so, we can stretch the limits of the space – visually tricking the audience into believing there is more performance and action throughout the space. One of the foundations for our concept has been constructed on the idea of limits; something that site-specific tests in a lot of it’s practice. We want to test the limits of not just the space, but our concept and our physical bodies; we can achieve this through the application of Pilates exercise to test and strengthen our core strength against the core power of gravity.
“ of site- specific theatre there is a “tendency to treat site –specific theatre work as a means of moving away from the strict codes of the traditional theatre and encouraging creative freedom” ( Wilkie, 2002, p.249)
Our concept allows for much exploration and trial/error practice our aim follows thus:
– It is suitable to recognise this project as an opportunity to stretch the transferability of performance into other industries, creating a fluidity; a clean transition , crossing the boundaries or limitations separating Performance and Science through interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary means; that is to suggest an integration of knowledge and methods from different disciplines by means of a pre-conceived synthesis approach or indeed individuals of differing disciplines drawing on their disciplinary knowledge forming into a pseudo-amalgamation of vision or perhaps of a development of a ‘bank of knowledge’.
This marks the initial construction of our ideas, and following our experimental approach to this performance we may find there are more ideas applicable and some that may fail.