The Creation

Our Site specific performance is not exactly how you would define site specific. As our performance has been inspired by several different venues including abandoned shops, Grantham’s Gravity Fields Festival and a studio in the Lincoln Performing Arts Centre. Our assessed piece would be more accurately described as a piece of Site-inspired theatre. I was inspired by Isaac Newton and the theory of how he discovered gravity. I took the simple apple and came up with 101 things to do with an apple. Why 101? The number 101 has many cultural references, as does the apple. 101 is used as a marketing tool to imply to a customer that a particular product gives you that little bit more, or goes that little bit extra. There’s’ 101 Dalmatians, Room 101 in George Orwell’s Nineteen eighty four, Route 101 and now 101 things to do with an apple. The apple is rich with cultural references, the two biggest being its link to Isaac Newton and more recently the Apple company that has provided us with some of the most in demand and smart technology to date. I thought to link these to ideas together would create a unique and interesting piece of drama never seen before. The piece centres round a list with all 101 ways and the audience would view the piece and see how many they could spot. To do this we compiled a range of different ways to show apples to keep the audience engaged. For example we had 40 pre-recorded videos of apples, 30 pieces of set that we performed around that showed other ways of using apples and the remaining 31 we performed live in front of the audience during the performance. On the 10th of May 2014 we performed our piece twice at 2:30 and 5:15 both performances were durational and we just performed until we had completed all 101 ways. The first time the performance lasted about 2 hours, 10 minutes and the second time about 1 hour and 20 minutes. The vast difference in time was because of the whole piece being controlled by a bell that would start and end each use of an apple. Sometimes the change would be very quick, other times there would be large periods of time where no one was doing anything, and was simply allowing the audience to look around. This performance was inspired by the Yorkshire tourist attraction The Forbidden Corner (which is woodland with various statues and buildings that you have to look and tick off as you find them) See Below a picture of the attraction;

The piece was also influenced by Brecht, as this performance had no actors or scripts, although tightly structured, our actors are the apples. Brecht said of theatre making ‘new things familiar and familiar things new’. (Willet, 1978, p, 23)

The seeds of an apple.

After an enlightening chat with Jeremy from Gravity Fields Festival, this performance has already morphed from looking into shops but to looking into science, but the most important element is the fusion of those elements. So without any more ado my 30 second elevator pitch is this… I want to create a piece based on Newton’s imagination and thought process when the apple fell from the tree and he discovered gravity. (Myth or no myth it is directly related to Newton and his theories) This piece would come about through the interactivity of a simple shop owner selling apples in a vacant shop in Grantham during the festival, the audience would enter the shop and be convinced of sampling an apple, the owner could tell the story related to Newton, and various other performers come to life and re-enact the moment and his relative teachings. For example the performers could recreate space within a space, having the apple in the centre, mimicking the sun. …. My thoughts on this are still vague but I like the idea of playing with the myth of the apple. It feels like the perfect blend of science (Newton’s life) and drama (creating a story)

Steve Jobs, has nothing to do with Grantham. He also has nothing to do with Issac Newton, although there are definitely parallels between them. Both Newton and Jobs made us view the world differently and that’s what Site Specific is all about. This week we learned about space and what it actually means in relation to us. There is space all around us but our eyes simply view it in mundane ways. I am sat in my room – that is space. In Lincoln – a bigger space. In England – a large space. In the world and even the universe and beyond – spaces that seem unimaginable. Sat typing this blog up I am looking at the space bar, which is in a space all of its own. I reflect on this now because I very much like the idea of non-space, i.e. an area that doesn’t correlate with you and what you might be presently doing. In my performance I would like to create a minimal installation, which perhaps forces an audience to eventually see the non-space surrounding it.

However getting back to Steve Jobs and why I picked him in comparison to Newton. There is one thing that links these two geniuses and that is… Apple. The word ‘apple’ has two completely different meanings to these two individuals. To Jobs it is technology and science, to Newton it is gravity and myth. It is these two individuals that have fused together my idea and subsequent pitch for Gravity Fields, 101 things to do with an ‘apple’. The idea is to create an installation that turns the myth of an apple falling and allowing Newton to explore gravity, into educational science. Having already discussed as group various ways to use an apple we plan on creating scientific experiments that would make even Newton himself proud.

Polishing the apples 

So progress in the creative process so far. We’ve pitched our idea and have started experimenting with performance, last week we put together a five minute performance re-enacting the tale of an apple falling and hitting Isaac Newton. This short piece of drama looked into the historical connotations behind apples. In this short extract we were able to inject comedy into the performance making the piece engaging for all age ranges whilst remaining as historically accurate. This week we are broadening into even more entertaining ways to educate our audience and make full use of 101 apples.

So for our second week of performance extracts we created an apple circus. I was the ring master character, whilst other characters consisted of; apple juggling, apple mime, apple poi and various carnival games that used apples instead of balls. What we tried to do achieve in this performance was injecting fun and humour into a performance by almost satirizing circus performing but at the same time showing something new and exciting by replacing circus equipment with apples. However what became apparent in this performance was that even when creating something to be laughed at, it doesn’t necessarily mean an audience will laugh at it.
So far we have been at a disadvantage, in the sense that our audience are our colleagues and friends. Erving Goffman says that ‘Society is organized on the principle that any individual who possesses certain social characteristics has a moral right to expect that others will value and treat him in an appropriate way.’ (Goffman, 1959, p 24) This relates to our circus performance, as we as a group of performers have, whether consciously or unconsciously created and tailored a performance that will make our friends and peers laugh. Our moral right in this case is that our audience will laugh, which of course they will because they are of our social group. Goffman goes on to tell us that humans, when interacting avoid conflict wherever possible and take precautions to prevent disruption, so therefore negative feedback among friendship circles is often sparse. Although special interest in these disruptions plays a significant role in a social group in the form of ‘Practical jokes and social games are played in which embarrassments which are to be taken usuriously are purposefully engineered.’ (Goffman,1959, p, 25) In other words, when performing a piece of comedy in front of an audience that knows you well, they will not take faults in the performances seriously, and take it in more of a practical joke way. In terms of the amount of laughter our circus performance produced you would think our presentation would have been a raving success, but allowing time for self-reflection I can see that in front of different audience our piece would topple like a precarious tightrope walker, whose only previous experience had been with a safety net.
Through this discovery, as a group we have decided to look again at how we can make the relationship between audience and performer different between the traditional spectators that would enter a theatre with certain expectations. After all Mike Pearson comments that ‘Audience need not be categorized, or even consider themselves, as ‘audience’, as a collective with common attributes.’ (Pearson, 2010, p, 175) In a conventional theatre the actors have the power; they are the ones that are the sole captives of the audience’s attention. What we have decided is to give the audience the power. By performing our whole piece in a shop window with no sound to attract audience, it is the passers-by who have the power to stop and view the performance, or even to turn their head and acknowledge it. We realized we don’t need to ‘spoon feed’ audiences and entice them into a performance space, as human interaction is more complex than that. If we as performers create something engaging it won’t go unnoticed. ‘All three sets of relationship, performer/performer, performer/spectator, spectator/spectator, become part of an active matrix of interaction and available for negotiation.’ (Pearson, 2010, p, 175)

Our last performance in lesson, we decided to strip back. We decided to show the process of turning an apple into apple juice (it’s not obvious but I guess that transition is showing science) We sat in a line and began the performance by each in turn eating an apple in synchronization. The feedback we got from this and what we really liked was the silence albeit the simple crunch of eating an apple. Then each performer took it in turn to pass down an apple and each performer (slices/chops/mashes) the apple to turn it into apple juice. We were hoping to achieve an almost factory manufacturing line. Once the process was completed we decided to show a video of a decaying apple, this idea of showing the live and the mediated comes from Phillip Auslander’s book Liveness, Performance in a Mediated Culture. ‘ In all forms of society, there is one specific kind of production which predominates over the rest, whose relations thus assign rank and influence to the others.’ (2008, p, 1) We used this to show an apple decaying/being dissected in two ways both live and mediated, it was then the idea to show the ‘rebirth’ of an apple by then using the apple in more visually exciting and innovative ideas. However by doing the latter we introduced elements of acting which is not what site specific performance is about, we need to make the piece real by doing rather than pretending. Evan Eisenberg mentions a similar situation is the music industry, in regards to recording music rather than playing it live. ‘Stereo… arrays the musicians before you in an empty space… The introduction of stereo… changed the phenomenology of the phonograph by adding a spatial and visual aspect.’ (Auslander, 2008, p, 85) Eisenberg’s point here is that when sound is divorced of the visual through mediation, the experience craves/creates a visual. In other words, if we act and perform as characters in our performance, we are cheating our audience out of another visually stimulating experience. In order the produce a successful performance we must do and not act.

As for the set we agreed on having a cluttered set, since we found out we were going to be performing in Studio 1 which is a relatively large space, we decided to make a cluttered space in the centre of the room, essentially creating a space within a space. We chose to do this because we originally wanted to perform in a small space so even though we couldn’t have the space we wanted there was nothing to stop us recreating it ourselves. I have begun collecting boxes and creating posters with various apple references all contributing to the overall performance. See below a copy of the apple eye chart I made and picture of various apple products on display throughout the performance;

Peeling back an apple.

In one of our last seminars, we were asked to discuss about key things that we have learnt so far on this module that we have found interesting or wish to research further. I discussed the seemingly simple point of, why do we perform? This question has fascinated me for so long, and is possibly one of the contributing factors as to why I am sat here now blogging for my university degree in drama. Every day we perform; we perform in front of one another all the time. It is from this point that we can also begin to question what performance is. At first glance, a person might not recognize that simply going to your favourite restaurant, is an opportunity for performance and yet it happens and will happen every time you enter an establishment of that sort. There is a certain set of guidelines you have to follow in order to function in society, an unwritten law that we are shepherded to obey, but why?

To try and fathom why, I have been reading The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life by Erving Goffman. So far I have found the reading enlightening. I completely agree with his points about when an individual portrays himself in a certain way, he is asking that person to ‘believe that the character they see actually possesses the attributes he appears to possess.’ (Goffman,1959 p, 28) And that that, in conjunction with a person’s appearance, they do to gain a higher (or in some cases lower) status than the person they are performing for. For example a customer may enter a restaurant and sit straight down at an unclean table. Here the customer is in charge as he is undermining the waiter’s authority. However if the waiter then comes over and asks to clear the table, it is socially unacceptable for a customer to sit at a table that is not clear of plates. Therefore the customer must answer ‘yes’ and therefore the power shifts as the customer gives in to the requests of the waiter. Perhaps this idea of power and status is something to be played around with in our ‘Apple’ performance.

Goffman also goes on to explain how friendships are formed, if we are all pretending to be characters. ‘When an individual or performer plays the same part to the same audience on different occasions, a social relationship is likely to arise.’ (Goffman, 1959, p 27) However I’m not sure this metaphor works in terms of the theatre and performance. As my belief is that if you performed a play over and over again to the same audience they would eventually get bored of a performance rather than warm to it. Of course though I am aware that the theatrical world and society are two separate matters, but Goffman does try to connect them as much as possible and through reading his work I wished he didn’t and focused more on performance outside the theatre environment. Still this book is a very useful resource when looking at social ideologies.

Another point that I have found interesting and this case useful to our practical work, is the work of Fiona Wilkie. She has identified site-sympathetic, site-generic and site-specific performance and ‘…challenges notions of easy congruence between performance and site, ‘that the fit may not be comfortable merging with the resonances of the site but might be a reaction against them.’ (Pearson, 2010, p 8) Our performance is site-eventful as our stage is the Gravity Fields Festival. It is also site-generic as we believe we could perform our piece anywhere, all we would need was 101 apples.

The first bite… 

We performed our final piece on the 10th of May 2014 in Studio 1 in the Lincoln Performing Arts Centre. Both times we performed we had audience pretty much the whole time but most often in small numbers, pairs and threes. One of the most interesting things I noticed whilst performing was that every member of the audience reacted to our piece differently. Some audience members wandered around the space, some amongst the set. Some members interacted with the set and rang the bell to stop and start the mini performances. It is interesting to note how people interpreted the set and the instructions differently. Outside the studio we had sheets for audiences to pick up and tick off the 101 ways, some people used them and others didn’t. I think audiences reacted differently because they didn’t know what to expect, but I liked this about our performance, it was excited to have to gauge how audiences were feeling and reacting to it. We asked the audiences to leave their sheets behind once they filled them in, and it was also interesting to see what audience members saw and didn’t see, some people did really well and ticked over half of the ways off. Others only had a hand full. What worked really well in our piece was the silent communication the actors had with each other. A bell sound would stop a performance and the person who rung the bell would then write on the whiteboard the next activity, the activity would start with the ringing of the bell again. This structure was very well rehearsed and gave the piece its backbone. Performing this piece again I would change how messy the set was, at the beginning the set looked fantastic and was organised clutter, but towards the end it just got too messy so something would have to be done to prevent that next time. If there is anything that I have learnt from this performance, it is the ambiguity of the word performance itself. A performance is more than a play with a script and actors. Its interactive, its doing and not pretending. It has defiantly opened my eyes to what performing is all about. It’s been a bit stressful at times but overall I am really proud of the work I have created. I’ve worked really hard to bring my idea to life and on the whole I think it was a huge success. See below a picture of the final performance;

Bibliography

Auslander, Phillip (1999) Liveness, Performance in a Mediatized Culture, Routledge: London.

Goffman, E (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, London: Penguin Books

Pearson, M (2010) Site-Specific Performance, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.

Willet, John (1978) Brecht on Theatre. Eyre Methuen: London