Here is our prism . . .
And here is what it can do . . .
Images such as these are to be used during tomorrow’s performance alongside live experiments with the prism. As well as showing what the prism does and Isaac Newton’s discovery we are also going to be experimenting with the light it produces on our bodies.
We have recently been given the news that our site has now been changed. We will still be performing in the ‘Gravity Fields’ Festival in September but our performance in May will now be taking place in the Lincoln Performing Arts Centre (LPAC). I think this can be seen as unfavourable due to the fact that we have planned out our performance to fit into the shop we visited in Grantham. However, there are many positives to this change as we can now rehearse our piece in the site we will be performing in. We also don’t have the issue of trying to get all of the technical equipment to the site as most of it is stored in LPAC. Although our site has changed, we are keeping our performances the same meaning that our piece is not so much site specific but it is site intensive or zone specific. For me, I think that our site is more metaphorical and can be known as the ‘Gravity Fields’ Festival. We have now adapted the piece so we have our original site in mind when devising as well as the new site making the piece highly versatile and could potentially be performed in many different spaces by only having a couple of changes to fit the space appropriately. All of these changes which have been made to our performance have really pushed us as a group in terms of being adaptable.
Throughout our previous changes, we have come to realise that our performance is no longer about explaining light and sound; it is more about what we have discovered and our journey throughout the devising process. We show this by having a video of our devising and experimental process playing throughout the performance. We are also experimenting with the sound waves whilst reading aloud a description of the original discovery and experiments which were carried out by Isaac Newton as well as other scientists. We want the audience to feel as though they are seeing us experiment with light and sound in an installation setup, giving them the opportunity to walk freely around the space and enter and exit as they please. By doing this, we are hoping that each audience member will be present at varied points of the performance, meaning that us as performers and the audience will be discovering different things and having a varied experience.
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.
As of today it is less than one week t’ill the performance day. Do I feel ready? Of course I don’t. I feel like all we have still is just ideas and nothing concrete. The problem is due to the style of our performance, I don’t think we’ll ever actually feel have anything t’ill Saturday. It’s going to be more like an on the day thing. I feel like this is how big companies would deal with hosting market research too though. I can’t imagine them to have much of a ‘trail run’, it’s just market research.
We have everything sorted. Videos, banners, products, all we need now are the people. The only problem I’m having at the moment is wrapping my head around the idea that this is a performance. We are not allowed to act. We have been told that for site performance we still have to play ourselves, yet.. I don’t see Jake Allsop, the 20 year old drama student, being the chief executive of Human.Inc. There are missing links in what we are doing and I’m finding it difficult to accept it, and if the people in the performance are finding it hard, I’m sure the audience will too.
Mike Pearson wrote once some exercises related to site, in which he asked questions such as “What would you have remembered had you gone there without a camera?”, “Write a text of 50 words describing one location you particularly remember” and “Make a visual representation/draw it”. These kind of exercises are solely looking at the idea of site, whereas due to the fact we’ve been taken out of our site, and we’re not doing something based on the shop we saw, I feel the performance for the audience will be too jarring and they may be left questioning what the point was. It all feels too safe. We’re mimicking what a real life company would do, it doesn’t feel like Site Specific performance, it feels like a business simulation.
Nevertheless in terms of what we have been told to do, we’ve made progress. I feel we have matched was was asked of us by the lecturers and in that singular respect I feel we have done well.