Our meetings are becoming more frequent as our performance date fast approaches and we’re continuing to take steps to enhance our professional image. On top of our employee badges, video presentations and labelled products we spent our latest work effort researching examples of leaflets and writing our own to advertise our company, its goals and fictitious achievements. We have also agreed to bring as many laptops and tablets that we possess to our performance in an attempt to establish that we are a group of tech savvy individuals. Our appearance is very important to our piece as we believe this is crucial in convincing our audience our company is a genuine institution in the UK today. As Professor for Theatre Studies at the University of Kent Patrice Pavis claimed, Site Specific performance “…refers to a staging and performance conceived on the basis of a place in the real world (ergo, outside the established theatre).” The real world setting is imperative to our piece being believable and not coming across as a group of Drama students pretending to be different people. As Jack Tullin has already commented in his own blogs, our age is certainly a concern as we are all in our early twenties and people in such a position at such an age is rarely heard of. On top of that, none of us knew really knew enough about the finer details of cosmetics companies and all that comes from being a part of one to effectively convince anyone that we were a part of such an Industry, which is why we have been so driven in our research and representation to overcome this previous shortcoming. However since our initial ignorance I feel we have progressed to a much more enlightened state of mind, a necessary trait in a Human Inc employee.

From the start of this project I have been keen to add multimedia aspects to our performance. Not only do I and other members of my group have tremendous experience with this, but I believed our idea for a company using scientific research to validate their products would appear more professional if video work was used. A few days ago Jack Tullin and I worked on editing a script that I had devised as an overview of our fictitious organisation, as well as quickly addressing certain products that we were currently developing.
Once this task was completed it was time for me to be filmed as the Chief Executive reading the script. This was much more daunting then I had originally theorised, as the nerves of being in that position kicked in and as an actor your instinct is to appear theatrical to compensate for your lack of confidence. However I had to fight this urge as that was not the intended look for our video. And of course this process can be difficult because you have to put a lot of faith in your director. Fortunately Jack is extremely knowledgeable when it comes to camera angles and professional editing, so once the final draft was ready my fears were put to rest.

Of course this is only one piece to our much larger puzzle, as we are supplying products and scientific explanations of said products for our performance. And as the day of our performance draws near, I still have confidence in the combined abilities of myself and my group.

I feel very confident about our performance piece at the moment. Through showing our ideas to our peers and Module Tutor, feedback has been very positive. True some of our execution has been criticised but our core idea has been met with enthusiasm and excitement. The concept of a fictitious company called Human Inc that supplies superficial alterations to the human body has evolved into a professional showing through market research, professional examples and media extensions. We are all working very hard to make this piece as professional as we can and I feel that the end result will meet our expectations.

The use of different space for performance appears as a daunting task to some. Even taking away the performance aspect, people can be very particular about spaces that they feel comfortable in. In fact it’s almost impossible to find a space that everyone can feel at ease in, because everyone has different levels of comfort and in a performance setting one can’t accommodate these feelings especially if they don’t know their audience intimately. This I believe can be a pitfall of performance; substantial issues or important questions may be addressed but some people wont get to see these because we as performers can be so focused on devising a piece and catering to those who are comfortable in our chosen performance space, that we unintentionally deny that smaller group of people the opportunity to see our work that we deem so important.

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.