Space in Progress

Finally a Sky Space!

2011-12-22T19:02:00.000Z

After years of following James Turrell's work, using him as a prime example in my BA thesis on light and space artists, always in search of exhibitions of his work in Europe and after seeing a great show of his in London earlier this year, at the Gagosian, last week, at last, I got to see Sky Space I in Varese, Italy. Part of a collection I had read and written about but had never had the chance to visit!

It was worth the wait! An entire corridor of "light" architecture created from Dan Flavin's installation rooms, leading to Irwin's window cuts and not so imaginary walls, to finally arrive at Sky Space...

Workshop "La cecità vedente"

2011-10-15T16:47:00.001+01:00

With many thanks to all participants, Alessandra Fabbri, Ruth Zanella and all those who publicized the 2-day workshop I gave last September at Magazzini Generali, Ferrara, Italy. In attendance to present "Blind Trust" here in town, after London and Brighton.
Click here for details on workshop.

Some images from 23rd and 24th of September

Blind Trust at The Basement, Brighton

2011-04-22T09:51:00.002+01:00

BLIND TRUST (a participatory performance on the senses) at The Basement (Brighton), as part of the Supper Club on the 23^rd of April.

Doors open at 7:30pm, tickets £8, conc. £6. Don't be late! Limited places available on a first-come-first-served basis. Looking forward to seeing you there!

BLIND TRUST is a one-to-one performance, in which audience members are invited to a 15 minute journey where the interaction with performers and being with oneself becomes a tool for perception, as vision and hearing are taken away to enhance awareness of what is tactile as much as what is only grasped by our sixth sense.

Concept, development, set design and presentation: Milka Panayotova

Original music: Giacomo Natali

Performing: Hamish MacPherson, Lydia Georgoula, Michael Kelland, Milka Panayotova

Approximate duration: 15 minutes

"Focus-Pocus" at Kinitiras Studio, Athens

2011-03-25T15:10:00.002Z

A short while ago I applied for a performance contest organised by Kinitiras Studio, Athens, with he theme 'What I like about the crisis'. I ended up in the group of eight selected pieces, to present at the studio.
So here I am, in one of my favourite cities, presenting 'Focus-Pocus' for six nights, where a valid ticket for all eight performances gives the right to voting two of the works.
Concept, development and performance: Milka Panayotova
Sound design: Giacomo Natali

The idea behind 'Focus-Pocus', as stated in my application:

Economic crisis is a time to be creative, a time to reflect, a time where you appreciate the little things and value what you have. I happened to spend my early childhood in the late eighties/ early nineties in a country of great economic difficulty. With recurrent electricity curfews, water shortages and general scarcity for everything, making the simplest the most precious, I couldn't think of a better way to have grown up into the creative and free adult I am now. True, I am still pretty moneyless, so my life is always in a state of crisis, but probably this is exactly what I need to keep it all going.

As a performance maker, working with movement and interested in audience participation, my idea for a short performance (estimated to 15 minutes) with the title

''Τι μ΄αρέσει στην κρίση'':

I like it that we all make more conscious choices and also focus on what really matters. So I am going to give that choice to the audience. They can view the performance with the help of little torches, while the performance space saves on electricity, why not? Low electricity bill and you still get to see a peformance. The audience gets the choice of seeing, not seeing , what to see and how to see it. They can focus on one part and forget about the rest, unite as a community and decide how the performance is to be viewed.

What happens on stage? The performer (myself), will execute a short choreography, inspired by the movement techniques of Butoh, around the idea of focus and concentration by using single body part movements and controlled breathing. Playing with the speed and pace of the shifting body from one point to another in space, responding to the interplay of lights coming from the torches used by the audience, the performer alternates movement and stillness, again to stress moments of spontaneity as opposed to concentration and focus.

The reciprocal influence between performer and audience within the space reflects the need, especially in time of crisis, to communicate with others in order to obtain what we want. On the other hand, we are also free to make choices individually, according to our needs and possibilities.

Sky Scapes

2011-02-14T15:27:00.001Z

Europe: North-West to South-East passing over the Alps from Milka Panayotova on Vimeo.

The Institute of Kentish Town

2010-12-14T00:18:00.002Z

Kentish Town Story Tellers

(an audio archive of stories created by visitors)

Tuesday 14^th of December, 13:00-17:00

Concept/Development: Milka Panayotova

Marketing/Design: Blanca Garay and Inês Silva

Visitors are invited to write a short story of three things or places they like about Kentish Town and share why they have an impact on them. Their stories get recited by other visitors so that each participant gets to write their own story and read somebody else's for the voice recording. An audio archive of short stories about Kentish Town is created, which will be used for a sound installation within the exhibition space for the duration of the show.

Come and tell us your story!

For more info click here.

Hemline at Somerset House

2010-12-07T14:20:00.002Z

Recently I danced for a video that was to become part of an interactive installation at the Somerset House, produced by Jason Bruges Studio (London). The work took inspiration from Loie Fuller and her skirt dances, so I enjoyed moving in a butterfly costume for a day.
Apart from the fun, the new experience and all the package that comes with new collaborations and meeting new people, I find the piece of subtle elegance and a careful study of light and space.
You can see it at the Somerset House by the 12th of December.

I am back, rolling

2010-10-31T19:10:00.000Z

I have officially graduated from my MA degree in Theatre: Visual Language of Performance with a distinction! My final show, Blind Trust, went really well and I am working on taking it to another venue now.
For the past month I have been looking into creative and job opportunities (the two not always go together really, but then again, that's another creative aspect of it all) and have been lucky to have a nice break from an exhausting, but indeed very productive, year. I have started going to some dance workshops at the Place, something I hadn't had much time for during my MA year.
Also, I recently discovered that luna parks, which have always had some kind of a 'sad and out-of-date stuck in the eighties' feeling attached to them, are beginning to involve our senses on a more personal level. A few quid to spend 10 minutes in a plastic sphere on your own, in an open field...It was a thrill!

It's called 'zorbing', and seems to be a new sport activity in fast expansion. It may only look like a simple hobby, but if you actually decide to move in a certain pattern with that ball, it does take the energy and skills!

BLIND TRUST details

2010-09-13T11:52:00.007+01:00

BLIND TRUST

(A participatory performance)
@ Wimbledon College of Art

Approximate duration: 15 minutes

One participant at a time on a 'first come first served' basis. Get your number!

Concept, development, set design and presentation: Milka Panayotova

Original music: Giacomo Natali

Performing: Charlie Hendren, Laura Erwin, Marta Masiero, Martina Armaro, Michael Kelland, Milka Panayotova, Rata Thuvasin

Thursday 9 September: 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm

Friday 10 September: 5:00 pm – 7:30 pm

Saturday 11 September: 2:00 pm – 4:30 pm

Tuesday 14 September: 11:00 am – 1:00 pm

Wednesday 15 September: 5:00 pm – 7:30 pm

BLIND TRUST takes you on a small journey of the senses. While it sets off as a visual experience, it seeks at creating further dialogue in the absence of vision and language,

concentrating on touch and movement.

The performance is divided into two main parts: one is visual, and the other is non-visual. You are invited as the only spectator in the performative space, which you are free to explore. You will be blindfolded at a certain point and your journey will carry on by trusting your other senses as well as the performers who will guide you for the duration of the performance. Based on the notion that the absence of a certain sense contributes to the amplification of the others, ear muffs will be placed upon you and you will renounce to your sense of hearing for a few moments.While you are encouraged to respond to the performers' movements and tactile stimulus, this does not mean there is a right or wrong way of doing so. You may interact or just enjoy your non-visual tour of space, texture and movement.

High heels: While you can totally trust our performers, which will especially be the case when you are blindfolded, high heels are not an option. If you happen to be wearing a pair you can still participate, we got some flat shoes available.

Share with others what the journey was like for you: you are very welcome to leave a written or video message after the end of your journey as reference for other participants.

* Please note that you may be filmed or photographed for documentation purposes and the material could be used for promoting the show. If you do not wish to be photographed just let us know.

My web page

2010-09-03T18:06:00.001+01:00

Here it is:
http://milkapan.com
With special thanks to Marco Lodovichi, photographer and web designer.

Blind Trust

2010-09-03T18:02:00.003+01:00

MA show goes on the web!

2010-08-25T19:15:00.004+01:00

Click here to see the website:
/http://www.wimbledonmashow2010.com/

Small lights, small changes, considerable impact

2010-08-22T19:25:00.003+01:00

Now that the space is ready and the structure of the performance is slowly coming to life, there are the little details to take care of. Small things that make a big difference in visual and perceptive terms, all a big deal for my final piece. Things like getting all the LED lights to work in unusual ways, blocking the massive green lights of the beloved health and safety exits, so dear to the British.
Great thing is I got the desired equipment, solved the problem with a flat screen way too big for its purpose, tried the sound system and many thanks to Eileen, got a heavy black curtain, pictured below. Can't wait for the two-day workshop with dancers leading up to the first show on the 9th of September.

Rehearsals with spectators

2010-08-09T17:03:00.000+01:00

For the non-visual part of the show I have been trying out different movements and actions to do with the participant getting feedback from them. My first participant was Marouso. Topics that came up: trust, disorientation, fear.
I am also testing these ideas while working on the information given to participants before each one can have their private 'sensorial perception'.

Story line

2010-08-09T16:04:00.001+01:00

A summerised story line of the performance, mapped out on the 29th July. Under development through practice and rehearsing with potential participants.

My space ready

2010-08-09T15:40:00.004+01:00

A couple of weeks of muscle fatigue were worth it I guess, my space is all ready and newly painted now.

Almost ready on the outside

Closing doors

Smooth walls

Floor painting

Rooms one and two seperated

Nutricion matters

Painting walls black

Ready

View from corridor (my space on the left)

Above photo taken from this angle, special tribute to health and safety

Well happy now!

A short story in photos

2010-07-21T22:49:00.003+01:00

On the 19th of July I handed in my final dissertation along with the research portfolio! So glad this is over. It was fun, but glad it's over...

And now I can enjoy preparing for my final show. This is how I left my space before we broke for holidays. Packed with lots of flats and red signs keeping away potential burglars...

And the building started, in the early morning... Two flats up already!

The risk assessment sheets are a must in Britain... Steve, our technician was too nice to explain it all in detail...

But all I care about is put flats up...

So great to get some help! A lot of help actually...

Probably I am gonna dream of those tonight...

I am always amazed at how inventive people can be, especially when they got nothing to do. That's some chewing gum on one of the flats...not using that one...

Here we go...

Getting there...

Closing the other side, it's starting to look like real walls!

Ok it's not so boring, not just a wall...there's a lovely door too...

Yes!

Will be back tomorrow!

Going Final

2010-06-30T19:51:00.008+01:00

I have been working towards my final show in September. So far I have found some dancers whom I will be meeting within the next couple of weeks.
At college we have had a number of meetings and have finally allocated spaces for our shows, all within the theatre building.
Here is my space plan:

I will build two rooms which will be used as performative spaces, where participants are going to be invited one by one (or two by two, still to be decided). There will also be an outdoor performative space, Dundonald playground, just opposite the college. And the nucleus of it all will be a meeting point at the foyer of the theatre, where audience members will be invited to read more about the piece and take a number in order to participate. When their 'journey' is over, participants will be interviewed and filmed on what they have experienced and the footage will be put up on a show reel for new spectators to view. As this time there will be almost no communication between audience members during the performance, the feedback loop will take the form of digital recordings. On the other hand, the autopoietic feedback loop between performers and participants will be influenced by touch, putting spectators in a position of reconsidering the use and validity of this sense.

Here is a sketch of some of my starting point ideas as regards to spaces. I had thought of allocating a room for each sense, but considering that all our senses are connected and work together, even if some are shut, I think that inputs of different nature may work within the same space and trigger various responses from participants.

It feels great putting all my ideas together now, realising that I have a lot of material and ideas I can use from what I have produced during this year. Working towards the final show feels like just placing everything in a well-defined pattern, yet it holds the excitement of the new.

We have a short break in the next few weeks, as we have our final paper to finish along with a few more essays. So I will be working on my final theoretical paper along with the development of my final show. A nice thing about this is that it will all be done in the old fashioned manner of pencil and paper, as I will be away enjoying nature for a change. Yes, machinery stays home this time.

On my way to discovering Scotland.

'Secret Service' at Le Volcan

2010-06-27T18:18:00.005+01:00

I am finally able to attend one of Felix Ruckert's performances. It's Secret Service, the piece I actually got to know his company with. It's part of a small festival in Le Havre, France, at Le Volcan.

Le Volcan is a big, chimney-like structure, that resembles a volcanic mountain, as its name suggests. Only it's entirely white and is the most popular venue in Le Havre that offers a rich program of theatre, performance and music.

Strangely, I feel the excitement prior to a performance one is presenting rather than attending. I know that this piace includes no visual input, so I will not be just waiting for something to happen in visual terms. Even after having read a lot on this piece and Ruckert's work in general, I suppose it's about the personal experience and all the theory doesn't really matter now.

The foyer has been transformed into a waiting room and people are reading through the informational sheet on the performance while sipping their fruit juices. I take my number and join the crowd as I wait for my turn to come up. I am already aware that Secret Service is divided into two parts: the first is about haptic experience and is more open to interaction, while at the same time participants are being led and manipulated by performers. On the other hand, the second part concentrates on pain and pleasure and it takes part after a break following part one. This part involves the participant having most of his skin exposed, in order to have more acute sensations. The main element is that all participants are blindfolded for the whole duration of both parts. Seeing strictly prohibited.

Number 8 is on the screen and I go in. We are seated in another small waiting room, with lower lighting. We are welcomed and soon blindfolded, one by one, as we are assured we can interrupt the experience in case we didn't feel comfortable or awkward. A pair of hands take me and and from there onwards I rely on my senses of touch, smell and hearing, on my physical balance and sense of orientation. My feet are heavy on the floor as somebody massages my legs swiftly, preparing me for sightless movement. It doesn't take me too long getting used to the fact that I can not see. I begin to perceive other bodies moving withing the space, even if I hardly have an actual contact with them and after a while it's possible to distinguish the few performers that are interacting with me by their smell, skin texture, weight or style of movement. I find myself walking and changing directions, running till I have no breath left, dancing, playing hide and seek and I even manage to hold somebody on my legs while lying down on my back. Performers are really good at manipulating me and yet I feel my body is free, maybe due to the fact that I am so cautious with it. Every little movement is thought and planned at first, but after a while I feel more confident to move around and it's amazing how complete the experience is given that language and visual input, the most widely used in every day life, are completely eliminated. It seems normal to talk with my body, move with my ears and see with my skin. It's over before I know it, a pair of hands lead me back to where I was blindfolded in the first place. I am back sitting on the sofa and I feel a cool glass placed in my hands. 'Here, have some water'. Before I know it my blindfold has been taken off. I drink the water and stick around for a few more minutes. On my way out I pop a couple of grapes in my mouth and I am again in the foyer.

There are more people waiting to go to part one, and some of them are probably here for part two. As I come out their eyes are on me, probably hoping to understand more about the performance, maybe they are just comparing faces that come out of the performative space, or maybe I simply find it unusual to look at or be looked at right after Secret Service part one. Strangely enough I feel uneasy walking towards them, as I am still adjusting my seeing-moving balance and involuntarily letting go of my haptic/auditory receptive instincts. Walking feels somehow very artificial now that i can compare ti with the space around me. But I start realising why people are actually looking. It's the only way of gathering information, especially from somebody they don't know. But now, to me, seeing is still quite irrelevant. I feel empty looking at them. I cannot smell them or touch them, or feel the way they breathe. My other senses have developed so quickly over the past forty-five minutes (which seemed much shorter) that I actually find it difficult to simply go back to relying on my eyes and shutting down my other tools for perception.

The intimacy of the first part made it feel like a very personal experience, even though audience members were in the same space at the same time. The fact that we would never see that space and the people who interacted with us probably freed us from the preconceptions of worrying how we would look in the others' eyes. Even though performers could actually see participants, it didn't really matter, because eye contact, which is what makes us the most conscious of how somebody else is, was not part of it. Being impossible to judge by the looks of somebody, we got used to recognising everyone through using our other senses in a more acute way.

Unable to see absolutely anything, at the same time, triggered a lot of visual input, which was obviuosly a response of the brain to what the other senses were sending out to it. This may as well mean that seeing with your skin, nose and ears, became just like seeing with your eyes. The very same mechanism was adopted by the human body, only it became evident through experience. Were we provided the luxury of using our eyes, the visual input would have overwhelmed and suppressed any other sense, which, in the case of blindfolding, was able to recreate reality through personal interpretation, making reference to past memories. Although it is true to say that any kind of input, be it visual, auditory, haptic or olfactory affects how we perceive and interpret, since vision is our principle means for perception, we tend to not only trust it most, but consequently share experience with others based upon it, for example describing something by how it looks. This is why I think that the perception brought about by the other senses, rather than vision, tends to be more personal, due its high indescribability.

Soon it's my turn for the second part. The procedure is more or less the same, except from the fact that before I get blindfolded I am asked whether I want to be handcuffed too. I am aware that this part does require the participant to be more submissive and concentrates on pain and pleasure, but it feels strange to set another restriction: movement. Fortunately I have a few minutes to decide, while the other two participants who have come in with me readily accept to be handcuffed. It actually made a big difference that they were there and I am sure that different participants would have influenced me in another way, according to how many went for it or not. The assistant sees that I am hesitant and assures me I can do whatever I want, just as in the first part, letting me know that the handcuffs remain for the whole duration of the piece (I didn't miss asking that little detail). In the end I go for it, after all it's probably the only time I can put myself in this situation without any possible negative results. It's voluntary, it's a game and it can stop whenever I wish. Actually, the perfect opportunity to get yourself handcuffed.

Again, a pair of hands takes me into an invisible space and my hands are clipped above my head, so that I am almost completely immobile. I can only perceive slight movements around me and am expecting something to happen. I start hearing some kind of whipping noises and am ready for a hit coming from any direction. However, it's first a tickle on my back. I am certain that it's going to turn into something harsher as I can hear has already happened to somebody else. And when it does, I can hardly hold my laughter. Somehow, as I knew what was about to happen, the actual happening of it didn't really have much significance at first on a physical level. The performer 'hitting' me also started laughing. With the little movement I was entitled to I start moving and trying to escape the whips and I get some smacks on my feet for that. I experience some horrible pinching around my waist and I am almost sure it's a needle. And here I dare to ask whether is so (and now that I think about it of course it was impossible)...'No, it goes like this' as I get another one on my stomach and I realise it's a peg. It stays there and I have no way of getting it off even though I try flexing and contracting my stomach muscles to get it off. It stays there and I also get one that closes my nose. Here I manage to reach with my hands and take it off, but realise that I was not supposed to as the performer behind me laughs along with me and grabs the peg from my hands. I recognise his laughter from part one. He is one of the strongest guys.

I keep on picturing how I look, something I was not worried about in the first part. The restrictions and the fact that I am being exposed in this way makes me feel awkward. I want to be able to do something about it. While the first part was more interactive, this one tests the participant's feelings of pleasure and pain. My legs are tight together with a rope, then gently untied. By now, performers have probably realised I need a break. My hands are freed at last, and I can feel the blood flowing back to the tips of my fingers. I am covered with a blanket and held and hugged for a long time before I am taken back to where I started.

This was definitely the more difficult part to participate in, because it carried a certain deal of psychological involvement, whereas in part one, reactions tended to be more spontaneous. In part two one was confronted with pain, and for as much as one is resistant, when pain doesn't have a well-defined reason, the way one reacts to it or resists it may change drastically. Probably this is the reason why I got tired of it at some point, I felt trapped in it and there was not a set goal for it. It was a test of pain and pleasure offered, but its anonymity and setting (a safe performative environment) made it hard to realise one's limits of pain. Of course, pleasure is another story. While with pain one is inclined to set his limits according to what the pain brings him eventually, except from if one sees pain as pure pleasure, is that pleasure is enough to feel satisfied with and not ask yourself whether it is going to bring you something because it already makes you feel good.

Another point to be made here, regarding pain, is that not seeing what and how it was inflicted, made it feel much stronger and real than what it really was. I must say that after the performance I hadn't even a suggestion of any kind of pressure on my body, considering the fact that I bruise way too easily. This also suggests that the performers were very well trained in order to be able to give strong sensations when they were not really so significant. Thus, the 'make-believe' effect was not only given by the fact that we were blindfolded but also by the training and preparations of the performers.

What is unique about Secret Service is that it is neither about performers nor about participants. The complex communication created between the two lays in its foundations, making the ephemirality of performance evident each time it takes place. It does, at the same time, hold a clear distinction between the two, making it possible for haptic interaction that is allowed to develop following a certain pattern, thus setting the limits of what can or cannot happen. Further, it makes dance and movement accessible to audiences that may not normally choose a dance performance to a theatre piece for example, or a rock concert. While body language alone, especially as employed by contemporary dancers and choreographers is abstract and thus open for broad interpretation, spoken language is more direct and therefore less abstract. This is why dance often has a specific dance audience, which often has some sort of a dance/movement background. Secret Service however, takes away the visual from dance, preventing an interpretation based on what is seen, so making dance acccessible to anyone through the immediacy of touch.

There are very few performances that have stayed with me for a long time once thay are over, and from talking to people I have found that this is very common. As Tim Etchells has said, if a performance doesn't touch you in any way, your mind going back to it every now and then, then it is not worth it. While this may be considered a very total point of view, which merits another chapter here, Secret Service is definitely one of those worth it. Moreover, its audience circumference is far greater than many other works which have a more specific target, yet remaining truthful to dance theatre and audience participation, beautifully making the sense of touch its main element at the same time.

Vedo. Show vs Share

2010-06-19T19:27:00.000+01:00

Few days ago it was open studio's day, as a lot of people came in for the private view of the BA show. A chance to 'show' your work and advertise our final in September. In this case, the word 'show' literally stood for itself, as everyone around was hungry to see and see and see something. Oh, of course drinking comes together with that! I don't know if they were looking for beauty, content, political awareness, amazing stories or whatever else one's tastes and interests are. It was certainly not the right context to share your work and ideas.
And since my work is about involvement and participation, it was certainly not the right venue for me.
Aim: offer a simple game, giving two options to potential paticipants. Put part of my final show to the test.
Why: Experiment, examine people's responses, get feedback.
Result: for the whole day, one person only (a friend) spared five minutes to participate.
It was clearly a fine art environment, where people were not interested in anything that involved a performative discipline. I certainly do hope that in September we will get more open audiences.

Organic Self - Pictures

2010-06-08T15:54:00.001+01:00

Click here for more info on this performance

Dancers and Performers wanted!

2010-06-08T12:53:00.005+01:00

How my final show is going to be is all in my head, developing, and it's already taken shape on some sketches.
I will need more than one performer, so I am in search of performers at the moment! Join the facebook event and share!
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=103342179714312

DANCERS AND PERFORMERS WANTED!

Are you interested in being part of an MA final show performance in September?

Want to show off you performance skills?

Ready for a new experience?

Keen on collaborating with others?

We are looking for contemporary dancers and performers with some experience on stage, for a participatory performance that deals with the senses and invites spectators to explore them.

General Rehearsals: 7 and 8 September

Premiere: 9 Septemeber

Replicas: a few of them from 10 to 16 September (exact dates to be confirmed)

All takes place at Wimbledon College of Art!

Contact Milka at:

milka.panayotova@gmail.com

07760505783

Top Secret

2010-05-29T00:57:00.005+01:00

Recently I contacted the creators of You Me Bum Bum Train and have volunteered to participate in creating the project that is to be presented throughout July. I am currently helping out with building sets and will be one of the two hundred performers. It is fun to be involved in a project of this size, so I am looking forward to the final results (all tickets have been sold already by the Barbican).
Till then I can say no more, it's top secret.

Organic Self#2

2010-05-29T00:22:00.000+01:00

While in presenting Organic Self for the Interim Show I had aimed at making the relationship between performers and audience members evident through the interaction of sound (produced by spectators) and movement (produced by performers), Organic Self#2 was entirely about audience and their interaction with one another.

It focused on touch and hearing, while vision was eliminated at the very beginning by blindfolding all participants. The 'flute players' were seperated in two small groups of six people each, facing each other within the space. Were they not blindfolded, they would have been able to see each other and their reactions would have been largely dependent on seeing. Once vision was eliminated, they could feel more free to interact and would feel less inhibited. Of course, this meant that they would have to trust their sense of touch to understand how the organ worked. Considering that vision is the sense we rely on most, everyone took their time until they realised how things were to work. Especially those sitting in the back row, whose 'task' was to pass the signal by touching the people in front of them, left themselves be entirely manipulated and rarely passed the signal; this was very different when audience members were not deprived of seeing in Organic Self.

On overall people enjoyed it. No doubt some were uncomfortable in a situation like this, exactly becasue we do everything by looking first and then turning to our other senses as reference. Somebody said they were 'unnerved' by the fact they couldn't see, while another said 'It made me feel calm'. Surely, all of us discover how their other senses work when we are deprived of one of them.

Some pictures, courtesy of Liushan Lin

Organic Self#2 at 3rd CCW Salon

2010-05-24T23:48:00.002+01:00

Things are happening so fast these days I haven't been able to update on my plans for my off-site showing. Few days ago I received an email for participation at the 3rd CCW Salon at the Flat Time House. I thought it was a great opportunity to meet new people and show my work outside college, combining this with one of the requirements this last term (presenting work outside school premises).
I had thought about proposing either What you see is what you get? or Organic Self again. I sent in documentation and info on What you see is what you get? and was pleasantly surprised to be invited to perform tomorrow, Tuesday 25th of May. Today I went to see the space, a really nice venue, which despite its clean, white, gallery walls feels quite cosy, probably because of all the small spaces of which it's made up, including a lovely kitchen. It is the former residence of the late artist John Latham.
With Josh's and John's help we tried to find the right spot for my piece, trying to black out one of the spaces. However, it was impossible to get a completely dark space, which is needed for the torch effect and the complete impossibility to see for the audience that it very important at the beginning of the piece. The place is full of light and it gives you a lot of space to breathe, so it was probably wrong to try and black it out anyhow. So I thought it was the perfect venue for the new version of Organic Self. After trying out a few arrangements I was convinced it was the right choice for the space. I am excited about taking this piece one step further!
Join in tomorrow, Tuesday 25th of May
At the Flat Time House
210 Bellenden Road
London SE15 4BW
Program:
2-5pm - Tea and open viewing of the works
6-8pm Performances
8-9 closing drinks

Questions rising, intertwining and then going their own way...

2010-05-19T20:30:00.000+01:00

Yesterday we split into groups and did a brainstorming of the ideas behind our work. It was interesting to see how some elements or issues that concern us linked, maybe something we hadn't realised before, and yet how differently we can all look at the same question.
Here's the map I plotted while discussing with my group.
We will continue on defining the main questions we want to exapnd on as we are working for and preparing for the final show.

Plans for June

2010-05-17T17:35:00.000+01:00

As June is getting nearer, it was important to make sure I have a space for the showing outside college. Various places I checked out have already been booked, while another had some strange requirements, including the fact that my audience had to take their shoes off. Also, most places are quite expensive, so the best option was to hire a place with a group of people, which not only has the advantage of sharing costs, but also presenting different work within one space, thus bringing in more audience.

A few of us went to check out the Rag Factory in Brick Lane, where I had performed a few months ago. It seems we have just managed to book two spaces for a day at the end of June.

I will present What you see is what you get, taking advantage of the fact that this piece requires a closed space. The idea I dropped was presenting 'Organic Self' in a park, as the weather is not looking good and I don't want to take risks at this point. I wouldn't want to freeze outside and put another performer through the suffering, along with all the participants involved!

Space Space Space

2010-05-12T21:50:00.001+01:00

Third and last term is kicking off! And it's time to present one of my pieces in a space outside school. I had been meaning to do that since presenting my first piece last December. However, I had realised how hard it is to find a venue in London that will not charge you a high price, making it really difficult for a full-time MA student who would not exactly be described as rich and economically independent (speaking for myself of course!)
Even big festivals like The Fringe in Edinburgh charge you for every single thing, from the hiring of a space to any minimal technical assistance, and this advantage is reserved to the selected artists and groups. Looking at the costs one wonders whether it's worth it to even apply.
It is no doubt a must to get out there, so in my current hunt for a venue, I do hope to get lucky. My advantage is that having more than one piece to choose from, I am flexible with spaces and have even thought of doing it outdoors. Problem is, outdoors is a synonymus to bad weather these days...
Let's see

Singing and dancing along (A look at participation in a Rembetiko concert)

2010-05-08T20:26:00.001+01:00

Going back home to the sunny island of Cyprus, for as much work as I had to do in such a short period of time, I had to go and listen to a live music performance of Rembetiko. 'The Mediterranean Blues', a common description for this style of music, which is still much appreciated in the countries where it was born, gives rise not simply to concerts in laid back restaurants and cafés but to a quickly spreading audience participation.

Rembetiko developed in the 1920s and 1930s in the port cities of Greece, among communities uprooted from Asia Minor in the population exchanges after the Treaty of Lausanne. This mixture of Oriental classical music, Greek folk music and Western urban environment created a unique style. With its “limping” rhythm and lyrics about depression, drugs, prison, death and unrequited love, Rembetiko became the expression of the outcast. Banned in Greece by the dictator Metaxas and in Turkey by Ataturk, Rembetiko is now been rediscovered, shared and celebrated by many from both countries.

The three performers were sitting on a table like ordinary clients, with their food and drinks in front of them. Tuning in instruments as if it were the most natural thing, they started off by playing a few familiar songs. Very soon, more people started arriving while some of them whould sing along in a low voice. The musicians nodded with satisfaction at anyone brave enough to join in even if omitting some of the lyrics. The clapping of hands that follow the rhythm of tunes is an alternative for those who are too lazy to sing, however, it requires quite an amount of experience as the uneven rhythms can often fool you. Some would also make requests for a song to the musicians by singing the first lines, and by the end of the night everyone was singing and dancing, having made contact with at least one other table of people besides the one occupied by the musicians.

Scene from Kostas Ferris' film Rembetiko

I believe that music is an art that reaches its spectator/listener with an immediacy that no other does and it has, thanks to this immediacy, managed to preserve audience participation as one of it elements-something other performative arts have lost throughout time. Audience participation in this case however is not only triggered by the music itself but by the casual setting (an unpretencious and friendly restaurant). Although it is true to say that all spectators here were out for a treat and were therefore pre-disposed to joining in and contributing to the performance, also given their backgorund and traditions, the dynamics of audience-performer influence is evident and undoubtedly has its roots with the very first musicians of Rembetiko.

After its official ban, the Mediterranean Blues had to be practiced in secret, which made

the sense of community created within those gatherings even stronger. People met and all participated in something that was not legal; whether musicians or not, they were all transgressors in the eyes of the state and on this common grounds the gap between performer and spectator never even had the time to form. This is why singing along with the musicians and singers is welcomed, as Rembetiko is about sharing.

The style of making Rembetiko and participating in it has preserved its original meaning, and although it is obviously not banned today and is no longer considered the expression of an outcast's life, musicians and audience come together not only to celebrate the Blues of the Mediterranean but to be part of a community.

Audience-Actor Ratio 1-200

2010-05-08T13:26:00.021+01:00

You Me Bum Bum Train takes a single spectator for a wheelchair ride, on a journey of different scenarios that are made up of no less than two hundred actors and performers. A 40-minute adrenaline session gives spectators a condensed taste of real life situations (some less 'real life' maybe)- from going to the dentist, assisting a bull fight and being famous to becoming a translator of a language you don't even know!

Role reversal takes another dimension here, as spectators are not simply becoming actors through the interaction with other performers. The presence of such a large number of performers for a single spectator shows the attention given to each participant, clearly concentrated on the personal experience of spectators. They are cured, adored, provoked, put under examination by the performers. Hence, the strong impact on spectators, who describe it as one of the most powerful experiences in their lives. I wouldn't blame them, despite the fact that You Me Bum Bum Train is not real life. But how many times do we happen to have 200 people there for us, constantly creating an imput for interaction?

The concentration of different situations in which the spectator is put inevitably wakes up their senses, which is another reason why I find this participatory performance so interesting.

A story told through sensorial experience (I Fiori del Te' by gruppo LIS)

2010-05-06T21:17:00.013+01:00

Few years back I participated in an itinerary performance, the rituality of which involved its spectators by engaging their senses of touch and smell apart from vision. I Fiori del Te' (which means 'The Tea Flowers' in Italian) was presented as part of an annual art festival, Fabbrica Europa. Since my work has evolved around sensory experience and audience participation, I recall this piece quite vividly and haven't happened to see anything like it ever since.

Gruppo Lis took its spectators on a journey that illustrated the Japanese ritual of tea through letting them explore their sensorial perception and thus making the delicate story somehow more accessible and real. Each participant was separately greeted by a performer with a hug and led into another chamber. The dark atmosphere suggested from the beginning that vision was not the only sense that was to be explored and used in this performance. One by one, audience members assembled in a dimly lit chamber and were seated on the floor. As the performers began to recite part of the story, people were given little knives and before we realised we were all engaged in peeling potatoes together. The lack of light made it a highly sensorial task, which brough together everyone in the room, including the performers.

The sense of touch and manuality were explored individually although by using the same elements audience members became part of a community. The simple manual task emerged spectators in the rituality that is attached to the growth and preparation of tea in the Orient.

The itinerary nature of the performance made spectators feel more participative as we were led to new rooms, each with different settings as every time another episode of the story unfolded. The performative actions, which concentrated on the visual perception of spectators, blended with moments of haptic experience, triggered by the settings and objects within the spaces. As single moments were marked by different places, it became clear that each episode contained its own ritual, whether it included visual, auditory or haptic involvement.

Barefoot, participants were conducted to a path of warm earth in order to reach the chamber where the story came to an end. The act of walking itself was transformed into a sensual experience, leading the audience into the conclusive act of the performance.

I Fiori del Te' made its spectators part of the performance by physically making them aware of the rituality that is contained within the Eastern tradition of tea. The theme of the performance perfectly matched its sensory elements, thus making the piece a very special event that hovered between theatre, performance and ritual.

Organic Self

2010-04-17T16:06:00.000+01:00

Orgnic Self was the participatory piece I presented with my sound designer Giacomo Natali, as part of the Interim festival Rendering53% at Wimbledon Colleg of Art.

It was a great way of working in the college theatre and try a piece where the audience was directly involved in the piece, as the communication between participants was encouraged in order to produce the soundtrack for the piece. It was repeated twice, and as the audience responses were different, it was evident how the dynamics of the piece changed according to audiences' interaction.

In my previous performances audience was offered the task of lighting the piece, or dressing the performer. Here, music was created by the twelve participants. Although the second time spectators were less, and I had advertised that the piece would take place only when that number of participants was present, we decided to take the risk and give it a try. After all, any instrument may still make music even if a couple of strings or keys are missing!

I will soon post theatre plan and documentation of the show.

Lab Two Report. We all have a responsibility

2010-03-29T23:01:00.010+01:00

Right...Not too sure what the layout of a proper lab report (that is not a physics or chemistry lab) should be like. So here is the feedback sheet I gave out to spectators after the performance. Those were the main questions discussed, although the talk was very open and different opinions regarding various aspects of the work were shared.

The primary question I was addressing was the audience space. All spectators had been facing a different direction, and I was happy with the result, as everyone had encountered some kind of difficulty in understanding where to look. Some had felt embarassed to move around in order not to make noise, others were in a place where the two main screens where an action took place were clearly visible at the same time, while somebody felt like 'being all over the place'. It was less than a 10 minute performance, and some complained of a neck pain... Well, tough, it's up to you how you treat your neck!
I must be honest, very few people gave constructive comments, provided that those labs were meant for constructive discussion, testing ideas and hopefully finding out what works and what doesn't. No doubt I had fun receiving silly comments from people who were simply maybe too tired or not in the mood, and as much as I may be considerate of my fellow workers' opinions, I shall remain concentrated on the comments I found constructive and therefore useful for my work.

I felt it is necessary to stress this point exactly because my work starts with the audience and their role. I recognise the complexity of spectatorship and my research aims at reflecting the spectators' complexity in terms of vision, auditory interpretation, physical space. I have a responsibility for what I do and how it is interpreted, but in this case the audience had a responsibility of giving constructive comment and they did not.

Fair enough, the following can be deducted from the more active members of audience:

1.Sitting arrangement was interesting, even if it created limits. To make audience members freer to move chairs the use of chairs of stools (with no back) can be used. Also, why not stools with wheels?
Why was the audience seated? Technical problems (lights and video screen couldn't be fixed high enough, so everyone's shadow would have been cast on the screens)

2. Visuals in different places were interesting because it gave a choice. This is what it was meant to do, although some felt that they couldn't see everything. But in the way we interpret do we actually see everything? What is everything?
The piece dealt with a curious case of a visual interpretation disorder. Maybe I was actually able to transmit the notion of a visual disorder.

3. The dialogue sequence (possible thanks to a collaboration with Lauren and Jeanne) was for some very good, as it enriched the piece. Others felt it was confusing. Those are two very different statements. Not because the latter implies that the speech performance was not a very good idea, but because they are of different nature. One has to do with structure of the piece and the other interprets one aspect of it. Well the two voices were really one person that had two minds: a visual and an emotional one. It is impossible not to mix them up!
I think that technically Lauren and Jeanne did a very good job. Of course time was as usually a problem and they didn't have enough time to rehearse (and of course for an ongoing project I would feel obliged to pay them!). However, from experience, voice work develops over time, and especially when working with always the same people, a certain rhythm develops, where the beat and time of words flows according to unknown rules.

4. The domino sequence. Managed to get some interpretations, although a few people found it was not necessary to attribute any meaning to it, as visually and sound wise they created a good effect. For another they marked the beginning and the end of the piece, which they accidentally did! They did mark two different interpretations of vision. To another they carried the weights of trauma, fate and reflection. I guess it was a chain reaction I wanted to include for its marking sound, that has to do with a rhythm in time. Visually a chain reaction shows how one thing leads to another and another again, which does have to do with the complex neurological system of vision and emotions.

5. Light stripes. Somebody recalled a similar effect from my first piece (What you see is what you get?). Am I developing a style here? The overhead projector was the best option for this, as darks are stark dark and lights are shining. A video may be endlessly versatile in the sequences of lines, but the darks are still projected black light, which does reveal what is in front of it.
However, I would like to do some further video testing.
The sequence appeared to be interesting in the beginning, when my body was not yet fully visible. Once I was fully visible, although the dark stripes hid some parts, one could make up even what was not seen. This was a very good comment. It is really difficult to know what actually people see when I am performing. I did film myself to see the effect and asked somebody to do a few movements with the light sequence, but it is different live and when you are in it! Since the whole point of this part had to do with seeing parts of a whole and never the whole thing, a more interesting light sequence will be tested soon despite the fact that a projection sends out more light. I will look into it, portakabin here I come!

6.Would people come to see my next work? Not many answered this, so I guess they didn't get time, didn't feel comfortable with it or just didn't want to say 'no'. A funny one was 'not unless it's free'! This was hilarious, honesty appreciated. But then again...I must remain faithful to analysing and responding. If I work towards encouraging an active audience, I must be an active performer and an active receiver of feedback. We all go to concerts, exhibitions and events that are free. It's a way of seeing more without spending much, and especially for students this is a big advantage. However, if I saw singer X for free a couple of months ago and found him utterly boring and unoriginal, I would definitely not go to see him again, even if it's for free. Why would I waste my time? I think this answer has to do more with the relation that the spectator has with money, and had nothing to do with the way my performance was presented and its structure.

Well, there goes a performance lab report. If it may not be of any use to anyone, it certainly has been good for me to gather a few reflections.

Some pictures from the show, kindly offered by Dun Yu:

Technical matters

2010-03-27T21:34:00.003Z

I was quite happy with Lab Two on Thursday, it all went as planned, I got to collaborate with Lauren and Jeanne for the dialogue part, received some constructive feedback.

Here's my technical plans regarding set-up, lights, performers.
A report on aims achieved will follow.

Reading between the (visual) lines

2010-03-24T23:34:00.003Z

Lab Two - A Self Interview

2010-03-24T23:31:00.004Z

What do I hope to achieve?

I want to create a space for the audience, where they feel free to turn around and look in different directions. I will be using different elements within the piece, which can be viewed from different angles, thus providing a choice of different visual as well as auditory imput.

I want to find find out how safe the audience feels with being in the middle of a performance space, which is an audience arrangement I want to use for the Interim Show.

Further, it is important for me to get feedback on the reception and interpretation of the signifiers within the work, which draws inspiration from a curious case of a neurological disorder described by Oliver Sacks.

Why do I want to achieve this?

In my previous work I looked for different ways of making audience discover and see through unconventional ways of lighting and stage design, which inevitably involved audiences' participation through their use of other senses such as touch and smell. This research has taken me further into questioning audience participation and its mechanisms. Although this piece is not of direct audience participation, it will examine the physical settings for audience involvement, which is an integral part of the project for the Interim Show in April.

What research questions am I asking?

I will be addressing mainly practical questions that regard the audience engagement. I would like to see how they can interpret and interact within a space that is not designed for a conventional audience. Furthermore, I am experimenting with live dialogue, which is something I hadn't employed in my past two performance pieces.

Note: My original idea was to invite the audience to join in the dialogue, but I decided this is not a good idea (at least at this point) as spectators may feel intimidated. I don't like hearing my own voice, and knowing that I am not the only one, why should I push the audience into something like that? For me audience participation must be a natural reaction only triggered by performative elements.

Back to Weighting Time

2010-03-17T20:18:00.002Z

I was so absorbed by our first written assignment over Christmas that I missed posting some documentation of The Weighting Frame, which was a big group project we presented at the theatre in Wimbledon College of Art right before breaking for winter holidays.

Now that I have started on planning my show for the Interim festival in the second half of April, which will take place at the theatre, I looked at the theatre plan for measurments and came across some images.

Almost all of us were performing or working on technical matters so we were unable to actually see the performance, but I think it was presented very professionally and was indeed a very useful and enjoyable experience (apart from painting white panels out in the snow!)

This is the result of my personal development of the 'Insignificance' room:

Some great pictures by Dun Yu of the whole set:

Chain Reactions

2010-03-15T21:52:00.000Z

Following up my comparison of audience participation to a chain reaction, I couldn't help thinking of the simpliest home made chain reaction, which everyone has made at least once in their life. I got these wonderful white domino sets and tried out arranging a chain. So I will be shooting a short video in the observatory soon to use for my next piece.

Rider Spoke - an intimate talk anonymous

2010-03-13T21:48:00.001Z

Recently I visited a couple of times the Live Art Development Agency. A cosy little library, which contains an amazing number of DVDs, books, magazines and other pubblications. I spent two days mostly watching DVDs that document the work of various artists who work in the field.

Although I didn't find any video documentation of the work of Richard Foreman, Richard Schechner and The Wooster Group, whose work I have only read about so far, I found the library very useful for getting to know performance artists and experimental theatre companies operating in the UK.

I watched a video that documents the piece Rider Spoke by the artists' group Blast Theory. It was of much interest to me due to their approach to audience participation. Rider Spoke sends out its participants on bicycles around the city with a specially deviced digital map. They are to find a hiding place where they can verbally answer questions about their personal life and emotions on a recording device, while the venues are indicated on their digital screen.

The video documentation I had access to was from Rider Spoke at the Barbican in 2007. While it contained technical explanations of the technology involved and practical issues, it gave you a taste of the participants' voice recordings, letting you in each private little world made of words.

While the piece offes its participants freedom and self-sufficiency, they embark on a journey unsure of what is to come next. Their orienteering skills are put to the test and they are asked to answer personal questions while cycling around or stopping at a certain spot, which could have been just visited by another participant. It may be said that the participants are the sole protagonists of this work and although their stories are revealed in a collection and released as documentation material, the participants are on their own and the project is about their personal way of interpreting reality given a certain setting (the city). Audience is not a collective organism here but rather a moving body of individuals who visit the same places all at different times.

Rider Spoke wants the audience to talk about themselves in an intimate manner, and there is no better way of doing that than letting each participant wander around on their own. Participants are confronted with their own thoughts and feelings, which becomes all easier to do in the absence of a rigid and predefined space and a spectator/actor who is there, eager to hear it all.

Space measuring

2010-03-08T11:26:00.007Z

The space I will be using for my Lab Two research and performance work.

Stirring up reactions

2010-03-07T22:39:00.003Z

As I have been developing some ideas on creating a participatory performance, I came to realise that a chain reaction mechanism could be a good way to imagine how active responses may be triggered within an audience, transforming them into a wave that follows a certain pattern. A pattern where one thing naturally leads to another, simply demonstrating the way things go, so well illustarted by Swiss artists Fischly and Weiss in one of their most celebrated works 'The Way Things Go'.

On Lab Two

2010-03-03T17:37:00.002Z

We have been split into groups and in a couple of weeks our group is presenting work. We are largely working individually and each is presenting an unfinished piece that may illustrate what we have been/are/ will be working on. We will give feedback to one another and also get feedback from another MA tutor.

I am going further into exploring how the other senses (such as touch, hearing and smell apart from vision) may be involved in a performance and to what degree the participation of an audience disrupts the visual aesthetics of the work. I have been working on different ways of seeing/non seeing, which has led my work to looking into the dynamics of the feedback loop between performer and audience. My projects have up to now aimed at involving the audience in unconventional ways and, inviting them to find out and discover both visually and through the other senses rather than simply showing them. My future plans will involve a participatory audience. I want to trigger spectators' reactions through providing and effective way of challenging their perception. However, it is very important for me that participation does not turn into a game or a forced element of the piece.

Complex and subtle are the words coming to mind. And they mean to describe what could ideally be attributed to the results of the lab.

Peeping Tom

2010-03-03T13:10:00.002Z

Last Wednesday I saw another piece that incorporated performance and photographic images at the RCA. It was presented by artists Ralf Obergfell and Tony Hornecker.

What I found interesting about it was the installation of small construction spaces that were built in the gallery. Each one housed a drag queen in her cubicle, apparently in a nautural pose: sitting, whisper singing, dancing or just reading a book.

The audeince was able to see the performers through little holes, all of different sizes and types, for example one of the little cubicles had magnyfing glass fit in the openings. It very much reminded me of my last piece and it was interesting to see how audience was eager to see what was in each cubicle. It really looked like we were invading somebody's private space, becasue the harder it was to see something, the more one wanted to see.

The presence of many different spaces created curiosity but after seeing the same type of situation in each of them, it was became a little pointless to peep as one could imagine what one would see. I would define it as a live installation piece, due to its repetitive dynamics.

I will reuse the hole wall again, in a different manner. But do I want a peeping Tom audience?

Franco B at the RCA

2010-02-28T15:03:00.001Z

Last Wednesday I visited the Royal College of Art for the first time to see an exhibition and symposium on gender and performance. Although my work does not deal with gender directly, I was interested in seeing Franco B's work as I was aware that he is a well known performance artist across the UK. The performative character of the symposium was of much interest to me in terms of the audience role and the autopoietic feedback loop.

Described as a sculpture swing, Thinking of you went into exploring the spectators' will of participation and moreover their trust in the other members of the audience. A swing stood in the middle of the space, waiting for its first volunteer; the lack of predefined performers made this piece a purely participatory performance, where the volunteers became performers and their audience was responsible for the direction that the piece was to take next.

Spectators were invited to ride the swing and take turns, the only (apparent) rules being that if one chose to participate they had to undress completely in order to use the swing and that the swing must not remain empty. This meant that you'd have to stay naked on the swing until somebody decided to take your place. The specially composed music that played in loop for the whole duration of the piece (an hour) made a beginning and an end clear each few minutes, but of course the mechanism of the audience had its own pace and each member of the audience had a different response.

Despite the gallery atmosphere and the fact that the piece was described as a sculpture, I found it highly performative and yet the audiences' participation did not seem in any way forced. The piece flew with a changing pace, and it wouldn't have taken place if it wasn't for the audience.

Audience Geography

2010-02-26T16:19:00.002Z

Audience Geography Diagram

(brown is the audience, arrows are its gaze)

I have been looking at different sitting arrangements for the audience. Since my work is about the spectator's gaze and point of view, I would like to test unconventional positions from which the spectator's view is challanged as opposed to the more traditional 'all audience look in the same direction' plan, pictured in the first picture.

It's all in your camera... Click!

2010-02-22T19:40:00.001Z

Yesterday the Chinese New Year was celebrated in London, one week after its real arrival last week. Trafalgar Square and China Town were bustling with crowds, apparently eager to see the numerous executions of the lion dance, the dragon's swirling movements, the various artists and their tricks. Since I don't know when I will have the opportunity to visit China and see these traditions in a more authentic environment I figured out it would be a good idea to go and see.

Some years ago I saw a traditional shadow puppet theatre from Bali and was amazed at the energy and movement that Asian performers are able to transmit through puppets and the subtle effects created by their colourful costumes. It was the first time that I saw what Chinese call 'The Lion dance', which is generally performed by two people, one being the head and upper body of the animal and the second animating its back paws. Although there were many interpretations around China Town, I think that the one presented in Trafalgar Square was the best. The performers were two young brothers, who were clearly very skilled. The doll moved with dexterity, jumping around on the wooden polls and whenever it turned around, making its stomach visible, you could spot the performers and see how they moved to animate the lion. The expressivity of the lion was not only given by the fast and diverse moves, but also by some little details on its head, which permitted winking and ear movement.

Being a big event, it was obviously very hard to see everything live, so a big screen allowed most people to see what was going on stage, though omitting the brightness and texture of the real colours. The audience. It was the saddest audience I ever saw. I just couldn't figure out why they were there. Oh yes, to take pictures. I must admit that the ladies presenting the event were not very good at getting the crowds excited, but on such events people are ususally there to have fun together; shouting at the top of your voice and clapping hands is a normal reaction one would expect. There were no reactions whatsoever, I found myself clapping and saying 'Kung hei fat choi' along with a few more people, while everyone else was looking at their digital cameras' screens. Not something new, of course, but I was still shocked at how people seemed so indifferent and couldn't help wondering whether their impressions are formed solely on the digital reproduction of the images or also on the 3D, live effect.

Somebody standing in front of me was filming for around ten minutes and then spend the remaining time of the performance watching his footage, claiming it was so much better than what was showing on the big screen. But what was better about it? It's funny, if somebody found themselves there without a camera, would they be able to prove they were really there?

Pictures form Mannequin!

2010-02-20T15:40:00.025Z

Photographer: Dun Yu

Click here to view all pictures.

Fancy an audience caugh?

2010-02-18T20:50:00.009Z

While having the opportunity of viewing various performance artists' footage yesterday I realised that audiences have an excessive desire to caugh during shows. It is something very common in theatres and cinemas, and although most may claim that they simply have a cold or an allergy, it is clear that audiences ( I won't say 'we', as I can't recall caughing during a performance) embrace this loud and germ-expelling act in moments of silence. Silence may be eerie at times for many. Coughs wouldn't be noticed that much, but they always happen to be in moments of silence.

Does a spectator say: 'Come on, what are you showing next?', or does he think: 'Ok, I'll make myself heard now that noone is talking and I might just get a response from another lad'? Or is it simply that a considerate spectator coughs at a moment when nothing is happening on stage and the rest feel free to do it as well after the first one? Whatever the case, audience caughs are undoubtedly part of theatre and performance.

The video recordings I viewed yesterday just underlined this phenomenon. In the beginning I thought it was part of the show but as I went on watching different shows I realised that it was not quite so. As my work examines the role of spectators within a performance and their degree of activity in a piece, I am going to try and incorporate a caughing member of the audience in my next piece.

I did some recordings this morning and played with the projection on a black screen. Dark colour screens seem to absorb colours in a such a way that images appear more realistic as opposed to the strong and contrasting colours projected on a white surface. Czech set design artist Josef Svoboda, who contributed a great deal to modern and contemporary use of light and projections, widely used dark purple screens, claiming this was the best colour to project on.

How did it go? (Mannequin- Dress me up!)

2010-02-11T19:13:00.004Z

Mannequin - Dress me up! was on last Tuesday. As opposed to the last piece (What you see is what you get?) it was done only once and was not originally designed for a limited number of spectators even though the space was much smaller than last time. The wall that divided me from the audience had little holes, which were for spectators to look through; this was their only way of seeing me. I must be honest, I expected less people to come, so I didn't put a limit to the number of spectators and it was my intention to pose an obstacle to their vision. While last time the performance took place in stark darkness, giving the possibility to each member of the audience to see by using a torch, this time the white space was heavily lid up, almost like a photo studio, but visual access was denied by closing the overall view and opening up little details that, given the number of spectators, one had to take turns to see.

Everyone brought a piece of clothing and placed it just under the separation wall (which was rising seventy centimetres from the floor). As they came in I could hear comments, laughs and realised how everyone was trying to find a place where to stand and be able to see. During the performance I sensed that people were taking turns to look through the holes as I saw the shapes of eyes changing in their little holes. From the video documentation I watched last night I could see that there was a lot of movements within the audience, and it was my intention to put them in a situation of 'Where do I go to see?'. By the end almost everyone was sitting on the floor, watching me from unedrneath, as I finished folding their clothes to give them back.

My physical presence on stage was very much based on free movement and improvisation, as I wore the audience's clothes for the first time. I tried to interpret their clothing and how it felt with my movements in space, strongly opposing the view to judging clothes by their looks. This is why I had a tv set playing a Valentino fashion show catwalk in loop, where clothes were there for everyone to look at. Although my performance did not refer to the fashion industry in any way, I found the catwalk an appropriate example of how people judge something by only looking at it. What would the audience think they would see upon entering if a fashion show was playing at the entrance? It is about clothes, and each spectator had one piece of clothing to give, and it is about looking at clothes...but the performance made of looking and seeing a technique each spectator had to develop on their own.

The soundtrack of the piece was once again a collaboration with writer and musician Giacomo Natali. I wanted to have some pauses of silence every now and then, when spectators could perceive me breathing or walking, even though some of them didn't see me. The sounds used were those of different sewing machines, the rhythm of which was transformed into that of the beats of a mechanical typewriter, thus suggesting that clothes can assume character according to who wears them rather than being produced to be looked at and chosen for their appearance.

The participation of the audience consisted in providing the costumes for the performance, just like spectators provided the light in What you see is what you get?. They were also induced to interact within the space and each other, in their choice of how much on stage to see and from which angle.

I am quite happy with the the result and believe that I can develop some elements further, incorporating them with some of the discoveries I made with the past project, shifting slowly to the outlines of my final piece in September.

Feedback from spectators was greatly appreciated. Some had enjoyed the 'non seeing' part of the show, while others suggested the holes were much bigger for everyone to see better. But I definitely think that the use of the 'hole wall' can be developed further and used in different ways.

I was very lucky to have a photograher at the performance this time, Simon, and soon hope to have some professional photos from the show to put up!

Mannequin under construction

2010-02-08T22:39:00.003Z

Preparing for Mannequin - Dress me up! has been great and I am extremely happy with the set up. Today was a decisive Monday, technicians at school have been really helpful throughout the past two weeks and despite little problems on the way everything seems to have worked out.

Now the performative part will be entirely influenced by the audience, or shall I say their clothes?

Clothes are a girl's (and a boy's) best friend!

2010-02-08T21:54:00.004Z

My project to be presented tomorrow started as a two week collection of clothes. I sent emails, put up posters around school and was quite positive about people filling up my pretty handmade container! No chance though. The idea of performing in audience's clothes started looking like a much harder task than what I had previously expected.

Involving spectators this time will be through using on stage something theirs: a piece of clothing, of any kind, any size, any colour. The Analysis of Performance Art (A Guide to its Theory and Practice) by Anthony Howell gave me material to ponder on and develop on the theme of clothing. For a contemporary dancer/performer what usually matters is being comfy in order to move freely and show your natural body, without any excessive embellishments. So although I have always taken some care of choosing what to wear on stage, especially when performing with others, it felt more like choosing what to wear before going out rather than preparing for a show. But being aware of how different clothes may affect our movements, I wanted to go for creating a piece that is based on clothes. How do we choose our clothes? By apperance? By feel? By price? We are so visually bombarded with fashion catwalks, although some very artistic, they always end up presenting the same models with the same walk, the same face. So we can all look the same, but do clothes feel the same on all of us?

In a city like London, where second hand clothing and flee markets are places visited on a regualr basis by almost everyone (especially Art students), I thought it wouldn't be difficult to fill up a basket with clothes: it was a way of creating some curiosity in spectators and ensuring that they do come to see the performance. But the basket was empty after almost two weeks of being at the entrance of college, despite all statements on my poster assuring that clothes will be taken care of and returned. Well it made me aware of how much people are jealous of their clothes; the difference between a Brick Lane vintage shop and my project at this stage is purely economic. I bet if I was giving ten quid to people for their clothes I would have collected some good garments!

Well to make a long story short, I had to change my tactics. When creating the flyer for the actual performance, I decided to tell people that they must bring a piece of clothing on the actual performance. It may be considered as their ticket to the twenty minute show. No clothes - No entry! I am curious to see who shows up tomorrow.

New Collaborations Opening Up

2010-02-07T15:03:00.006Z

Some days ago I got contacted by a colleague and friend of mine, Filipe Canha, who was directing a show and was in need of a second performer. I had already accidentaly read an article on the project in question the previous day, the concept of which involved our senses besides seeing, so although a coincidence it turned out a great opportunity of collaboration for me both as a performer and concept creator researching on ways of (non)seeing.

Useless/Useful participatory fashion performance and exhibition is an ongoing project that involves both graduates and current students from UAL as well as other professionals. Episode one, which was presented yesterday at the Rag Factory in Brick Lane, was, as the name suggests, very much about fashion and audiences' participation. The costumes, created by Christina Tso, looked at the touch and hear aspect of fashion, rather than solely rely on the visual effect. The costume I performed in had sound sensors attached to it and therefore sounds were generated according to body movement. Even though the rigid parts of the costume along with its cables and little gadgets did restrict the fluidity of movement, it allowed me to perform a consistent and yet simple choreography that exhibited the garment and at the same time brought it to life. Dancer Marta Masiero wore an unsusual black tutu that unveiled thousands of tiny blue lights that somehow resembled colourful sea corals that moving under water.

Along with the performance director, sound technician, set designer, make up artist, graphic designer, film maker, cameramen, photographers, and many more who were there for help and support it was possible to put up a great piece of work in a matter of weeks. I was not there from the very beginning, but working all day with the same people on the same thing makes you familiar with it all in no time.

The end part of the performance was about audience. It aimed at showing spectators the costumes, letting them interact with the garments' qualities and possibilities. As we had two performances one after the other it was good to see how they changed according to the number of audeince. The sencond one proved to be the best and we even got a spectator who got so interested in exploring the costumes that by the end of the show she was believed to be one of the performers. Indeed she was, as we all merged together to bring the piece to an end. The whole project was documented step by step, so I will update with links to material from the actual show.

I really enjoyed working on the project and got to meet lots of great people. I am looking forward to future collaborations and whatever future results may bring, I must say that this time the timing was perfect, given the performance I am presenting next Tuesday explores clothing and fashion in a way very close to the themes of senses and audience participation that Useless/Useful is working on.

More than shadow theatre

2010-02-04T13:24:00.000Z

Last week I was happy to learn that Pathosformel, an Italian based company was coming to present one of their pieces at the Mime Festival. I had gotten to know them through a workshop I participated in Bologna last summer and was eager to see their work after having a look at some videos they have on youtube.

La timidezza delle ossa (translated as The timidity of bones) was a work that combined graphic simplicity with body movement and sound design. Its duration was just under half an hour, which is the safest and most effective time for a performance, as stated in some of my older posts. There is time to develop a concept and yet keep all the visual imput fresh in a way that it leaves the spectator concentrated, without loading them with too much information.

The set design consisted of a white screen, behind which the bodies of the dancers interacted, making visible to the specatator only certain parts of the body at a time. What I found of exteme originality was that it was not simply the 2D shadow theatre play that took place behind the screen, but that the choice of felxible material for that screen permitted the performers to press their bodies against it, creating 3D protrusions that varied slightly in their intensity, so creating a visual play of shadows that was very visual and physical at the same time.

Many critics refered to the archeological quality that these images created. However, the fact that bones were actually performers moving, pushing against eachother and transforming themselves did not really give me the idea of archelogical reamins, which have been static for centuries. Further, I noticed how at some point diring the show, although the quality of the images had developed a certain consistency and therefore the spectator knew what the work was about, my eyes started perceiving what was on the screen as a digital projection even though I knew it was real bodies behind the screen. Talking to Paola Villani (founder and performer along with Daniel Blanga Gubbay of Pathosformel) I was surprised to learn that this seemed to have happened to other spectators in the past.

It is amazing how our perception changes even if the qaulity of an image stays the same. Is it our brain that is so used to changing pictures and different qualities that it inevitaly offers a variety of perceptions even when not needed?

New Documentation

2010-01-29T13:20:00.003Z

While reading through Tim Etchells' Certain Fragments I came to realise that its title did in all ways reflect its contents and style. It is a fragmented bundle of essays, writings and ideas. Basically the ideal book for me, as it allows you to choose from a lot of material easily and quickly without going into too much of academic issues for fifty pages that don't give any satisfaction as it's all about an ongoing research.

'That documentation of live events is an attempt at capture, a dragging down of the ephemeral into the fossilising mud of all that is fixed and fixing'
(p71)

While strongly agreeing to that concept, recognising the ephemeral qualities of live performance, I consider it necessary to keep track of one's work, and when one's work has to do with images, its documentation must be, at least partially, made of images. The documentation of work may be a starting point of collaborations and discussion and in no way does it actually represent a piece of performance.

So here are some photos taken yesterday, that document 'What you see is what you get?'. Some fragments of the show were 'replayed' live so as to get more quality stills than what was possible during the performances in December.
Thanks to Jeanne Mirodatos, who was extremely dextrous at shining six torches at a time and to Giacomo Natali, who had worked with me for the performance, producing its soundtrack and assisting in technical matters.

Mannequin - Dress me up!

2010-01-27T12:13:00.001Z

My next project involves the audience in a different way. I am asking them to bring clothes for me to perform in and the pieace will evolve around the indirect and yet very personal participation of spectators. Their clothes will be exhibited on stage, revealing each spectator's tastes, behaviour and ideas. After all, clothing always says something about us.

Butoh and miscellaneous

2010-01-27T01:20:00.004Z

The Mime Festival London is an annual event that brings together performers from different backgrounds and practice. However, as the name suggests, it is not exactly theatre or performance that the festival deals with. Looking through their site while getting informed on what was on and what could possibly interest me, I got the feeling that this initiative was very close to the art of circus, which I did admire as a child. Of course with the fusion of different arts together it is difficult to define a piece by a single term, but when an element seems to take over by far more than the others, then we are bound to tag it as such and such.

One of the works that caught my attention (and mind you, it was probably the only one on the internet site that did not include a video trailer) was Kitt Johnson's Rankefod. One of the reasons why I went to see it was that the performance was a solo work and since I have been doing solos so far, I considered it useful to see how she handled it. Also I am fascinated by the Japanese Butoh dance and although I have just received some basic training in that field so far, there is much to learn by watching.

Kitt Johnson gave a stunning Butoh performance, yet very personal. Rankefod explored the origins of species and the dancer's body went though a series of transitions, which, combined with fairly simple but effective lighting, created images that were somehow awkward in appereance and yet familiar in their organicism. The exploration of species, translated into by the body of the dancer, was certainly given more weight by the nudity of the body, which revealed all muscles and therefore the smallest movements were sensed by just perceiving the breathing of veins. Butoh dance is often performed without clothing, tending to concentrate the spectators' attention solely on the body, which is the protagonist of the piece. The body of the dancer assumes such a strong role that it would overshadow any other static objects or set design which are part of the performative space.

But however empty the scene looked to us, certain light effects revealed the presence of a panel at the back of the stage. Although its texture permitted some versatility in the visual play of light I found that it did not fit with the blunt and powerful presence of the body, the white and homogenous texture of its skin. The fakeness of the panel was reveled at the end of the show when lights were switched on and it triumphed in all its kitch and heaviness. It became the backdrop for the after show discussion. I didn't ask 'Why this panel?' because the interviewer annoyingly paraphrased the audiences' questions for the official recording of the talk.

It was a very good dance performance despite the fact that stage settings did not quite work for my understanding of the relationship body-space. Kitt Johnson's long plait, even though understandably there for practical reasons, seemed very much like those magic tails in Avatar, which gave the sense of species in a broader context, making this small detail more meaningful than the crafty and cumbersome panel.

Ideas Progressing

2010-01-21T12:49:00.000Z

As work is developing towards my next performance, here is a little construction I made at the wood workshop yeasterday. By tomorrow it will become a container, another step of involving the audience in an unintrusive way.

dimensions: 90x40x80

Torchigraphing

2010-01-20T16:27:00.002Z

Some of the first images from my photography work depicting objects lid by a torch. This project is part of my project proposal submitted in January.
Torches come from my last performance 'What you see is wht you get?'

Art in a Van

2010-01-19T15:23:00.000Z

Last weekend I enjoyed a nice day at Brixton Market in South London. Every place we go to has an aim to it and visiting a market usually implies shopping or dining, and if Brixton is the place, then dining would most probably include African and Caribbean cuisine. Well my aim for going there does indeed expresses my Italian side as I came to discover that the best pizza in London can only be found at the entrance of the market, precisely under the banner 'Franco Manca', but you won't miss it, queues are just as massive as the ones in the best pizzerias in Naples.

After a delicious Margherita I strolled around the market, looking at some of the peculiar products offered on sale; markets are always full of new and amazing things to get to know. And they are all there to explore without obligation to buy them and stuff your home with things in boxes, beacuse very often, that is where great bargains end up.

I came across an art initiative called Art in a Van. The installation on show that day was a small camera obscura, in which audience was invited and from where one of the shops could be spied on, with the upside projection of its image.

What I liked about the work set up in that particular place was the drastic contrast between colours, movement and light outside and the dark room from which one could see the outside. Although the image could have been reinverted in order to look at it correctly, in my opinion, it was left upside down not only becasue of the poor materials and little space at disposal, but also to underline the fact that it is a 'mechanism' we looked through to see the shop infront of us. Once we came out the same view became (or just went back to) a completely different reality.

If you are interested to go and see it, it's on till the 11th of March and must be open the same hours as the market. I would advise that you don't leave the market without trying the pizza...

Versatile for Versatility's Sake

2010-01-17T18:07:00.008Z

Recently a multidisciplinary performance with the curious name of 'Room Temperature Romance' was presented at the Barbican Pit Theatre. It was performed by two young dancer-coreographers and I considered it could be interesting for me mainly from a technical point of view.

What struck me as an audience member was the fact that everyone around me was eating and drinking prior to the show and when the performance started the noise of munching and slurping was transformed into giggles and laughter. Well it's great to be around happy people, but it almost felt like a little ritual to cover 'funny moments' rather than a natural reaction.

The performance was very stage centred, and there was the typical 'theatre' presence which drew the audiences' attention fully, for a whole seventy minutes, no interval. Eleni Edipidi and Bethanie Harrison showed off for spectators, keeping an eccentric behaviour on stage. Two girls lived in their fancy world of fashion and dreams on stage, thus making the barrier between performer and audience an important aspect of the piece, despite the performers' original statement, found on the leaflets outside the theatre, that said 'We encourage an intimate exchange between audience and performer'.

Fancy dresses, talking about boys, swinging on ropes, digital projections that somehow resembled MTV music videos and little IKEA lights that were randomly turned on and off were all part of a set design in motion that probably wanted to say too much and so couldn't keep a story running throughout. The Frida Kahlo-like painted eyebrows of the two performers immediately granted them more character, but after a while they didn't seem to have any meaning except underlining the constant presence of the performers on stage. The performance was based on appearances, and it was very narcissistic altogether, which is probably why I did not find it particularly original.

There were surely lots of ideas there , but they were scattered in a pattern that did not put them together to make a good whole, and even if the aim was to present a dispersive world of various aesthetic realities, it was not done with a consistency that justified its length. The final video projection was a documentation of the work in progress, which showed the performers trying on their fancy dresses and giggling for another five minutes, with subtitles and names, which seemed more of an excuse to have a video work on the wall rather than part of the piece.

Whoever may have the opportunity of seeing this award winning piece I wouldn't want to ruin them the ending, although this notion probably comes from watching cinema and not theatre. So I might as well go on by saying that the storming in on stage of dozens of soft toy pigs, with their own mechanism of moving legs and wagging curly tails was most probably the most interesting part of the whole piece and could have been a starting point for a new performance. As the audience got up to leave and was naturally drawn to go and see the litte pigs from closer, they were immediately stopped by staff as if they were attacking the dancers...intimate exchange?

New Year...Old Story? London and Snow

2010-01-06T18:03:00.001Z

Happy New Year 2010!

I haven't updated my blog not due to the Christmas holidays (although they are always a nice break), but due to the fact that they coincided with writing our first term essays. It's been good to put together my ideas in a more formal context, so I am looking forward to feedback now.

As we are also preparing our portfolio to present on the 15th of January, right on Monday I started my normal school life. To my surprise, I soon found out that England is not in fact a country that can be found on a world map within the range of Northern Europe. Here, snow is a phenomenon that everyone fears, and when it comes, people prepare for war. In fact, Wimbledon College of Art was closed its doors today, with no previous notice, and it seemed like a ghost building that has been empty for over 20 years. You could give the same judgement if you had the pleasure of staying in the MA studio the last couple of days and realised that the temperature was probably lower in there than outside.

Well, let's see how this year goes! I am very satisfied with my work so far and also happen to have extremely creative and supportive colleagues. For the rest I haven't got mastercard, but we will make it work!

Live wins

2009-12-18T00:38:00.002Z

I am extremely satisfied with the outcome of two weeks of hard work for my performance 'What you see is what you get?'. I presented it yesterday at the observatory of the college. It was designed for a limited number of people, so I did it twice, which was a good way of testing my audience.

My interest was in involving the audience in a non intrusive manner, and yet make them question their way of seeing and looking at things, putting under careful examintation their vision and other senses, such as smell, touch and taste. That is why I decided on using no lighting whatsoever, handing everyone a small torch in the beginning of the performance, when everyone was sitting in stark darkness (it did take a while to make sure there were not streaming lights from outside or all the equipment used for the piece) not really sure of what was to happen next.

It was great doing the performance twice, because audiences responded differently, changing slightly the timing of what is seen and when, which was a clear demonstration of the autopoietic feedback loop (the exchange that happens between performer and audience). Also, audiences varied slightly in number, which changed the amount of lighting avilable:less people equals less torches.

It was clear to me that I was taking a risk giving around all these torches and letting people play with them, but it is also true that I had a very sensible audience. It was interesting to be influenced by the light from the flashlights they used and yet maintain the rhythm I had previously worked on and calculated also keeping to the soundtrack that was created especially for this performance.

What I find most stunning about working with the dark, as opposed to light, is that the other senses are induced to work more, and the audience is put in a position of finding out what the best way to 'see' is. In my effort of putting together some video clips of the documentation of the performance, I find that it is extremely hard to understand what the piece was about. If one was not there, it is almost impossible to understand what happened on stage and how it evolved. Although I am sorry not to have a good recording of it, I realise that the impossibility to document it properly means that it is a piece that makes sense when performed live, and since live comes before mediatized for me, both as the performer and director of the piece, I am very happy with the final result. I got some very valuable feedback from spectators and would definitely like to present the piece again, and why not in another venue.

What you see is what you get?

2009-12-09T21:59:00.000Z

My role plus your role equals our role minus...

2009-12-06T16:11:00.005Z

It had been a while since I read so much academically. I am reading a lot of material that will inform both my practice and theoretical writing for this year. Although I am always very critical to my work and how I carry out a certain project, which can sometimes become a major cause for procrastinating the realisation of ideas, I feel that in studying certain aspects of performance I am becoming more conscious of not only the aesthetics of performance but also the complex relationship spectator-audience.

I have been reading the Emancipated Spectator, by French philosopher Jacques Ranciere, which explores the changing role of the contemporary specatator. The active spectator, as opposed to the more traditional, passive one, is not new to us, but Ranciere's approach, I believe, also examines the parameters of passivity and activity in the spectator. My interest in this topic is 'fed' by the fact that a lot of performance works nowadays involve the spectator in a such a way, that he becomes not only part of the performance itself, but sometimes the protagonist. In this role reversal it is not only unclear who is who, but in my opinion, it is unfair that a performance is directed by so an and so. If the spectator is in the centre of attention, then we have an event that has been created following someboby's idea, it is not directed. And why do we have to pay to see a performance if we are just going to be conducted through a workshop? I find workshops an amazing source of ideas, information and self-formation. But I do believe that sometimes the terms attributed to performance may be misleading for spectators. And for the time being, I am very far from the notion that spectators are necessarily passive if they do not do something, but rather watch a performance from their seats, be it in theatre or in a less conventional space.

This is why I feel it's necessary to explore these issues further. It will surely help me understand better how I can keep my audience active and at the same time maintain the distance that separates audience from performer, which is what actually differs performance from real life.

And talking about the stage and real life, I recommend the book Mimesis, by Matthew Potolsky, a wonderful overall account of how the term mimesis has applied to fields as literature, performance and cultural studies throughout time, exploring theories that range from Plato to contemporary thinkers.

Physical Work

2009-12-04T18:37:00.016Z

This week some of us spent a day at the wood workshop to construct some furniture for the rooms of the three hour piece we are doing on the 18th. It was indeed a very productive session and I think we did a great job.

Although I studied and practised Fine Art for so many years, at some point I realised it didn't fit my personality and was merely a tool for my work, rather than a final product that communicates my ideas. But what I most miss from painting and sculpture is the manuality that there is to it. Getting into theatre-dance and performance allows me to work within spaces, in different aspects, and although I do a lot of physical exercise for dance, I always miss the physical work that's involved in crafting.

Last weekend I visited the Open Studios Art Show at Wimbledon: two warehouses turned into artis's studios, more than a hundred painters, sculptors and ceramicist. It was nice to see so many artists together, exhibiting their work in their tiny studios that had turned into small galleries for the event. In a way, I wished I was like one of those artists, with my little studio, painting away for as long as i wish. But I also perfectly know that this just doesn't suit me, so I figured out that what I miss is the manuality of making something, even if the product is not the piece that would communicate with the audience.

So what better way to fix this dilemma by making my own props?

We had fun and obtained good results. Can't wait till next time! (I don't mean 'Come to me if you need some fixtures and fittings')

Time Piece

2009-12-02T21:24:00.003Z

Here is the video of the performance we created in occasion of David Gale's workshop in October.

You can find further info on the workshop here and here.

I am the director!

2009-11-30T19:59:00.004Z

For our second joint project (The Weighting Frame), I was to work with a colleague of mine for one of the four rooms,precisely the one that has Insignificance as a main theme. Well the collaboration didn't really take place at all,as she dropped off the course. So I was left on my own. Now I am directing the piece myself, which is even more challenging. I will be the only performer in the space, and with the help of our talented lighting team the Insignificance room will be quite minimal and yet some actions are going to take place. The duration is three hours, quite a while we have at our disposal. I imagine the whole piece to be some sort of an installation-happening,where the line between theatre and performance art is almost inexistent.

One out of four is good

2009-11-29T19:01:00.003Z

Firsts is an amazingly versatile festival for young and emerging artists that takes place annually at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. Beautiful place, smart initiative and last but not least, great prices for poor students. It is a tough job choosing what to see in London: no doubt there is always the embarassment of choice, but you know there is also a high risk of ending up in a naff show, with a touch of obvious, unvoluntary amateurism and bad taste. Well the risk is worth taking anyhow.

On Tuesday night there were four performances presented, and for me one of them definitely stood out by far from the rest for professionally carried out work and attention to detail.

Finnish Ilona Jäntti, aerialist, presented Elsewhere, a short performance that combined aerial dance with video animation. Although simple in structure, the piece was visually very interesting and complete, the body language of the dancer and the video became the protagonists of the story. It showed that the animator (Tuula Jeker) had closely worked with Ilona during the creation of the work, so that the two elements fused perfectly together. Probably this is very often taken for granted in performance, but it's seldom that you see a performance where elements of different nature (for example 3D and 2D) are combined in a smart way, where they make sense together, even though different media is used in different ways.

The attention of the relationship between video and body reminded me of the work I did with Collettivo Almagesto in the past year, and it's definitely something to continue researching on.

Firsts was on for several nights, and each one offered a few short performances. Quarter to half hour really seems the best duration for a performance. You are sure to have the audiences' attention. If you go over that you really need to have something extraordinary to show to keep spectators satisfied (if you wish).

I would love to participate in Firsts 2010 and as this year we are embarking on a number of different projects at Wimbledon, who knows, maybe the VLP group could be on stage at the Royal Opera House next year...

Gift 1 - Dinner for a fox

2009-11-26T20:14:00.002Z

Here is the video I created for Tim Jeeves' workshop that looked at different points of view on what gifts represent.
Turn up the volume since youtube's compression has reduced it somehow.

Dance, blindness and a change of roles

2009-11-25T20:52:00.000Z

Although I have been fascinated with blindeness lately, as I think of my small project to present in December, together with my project proposal and critical practice paper I have started asking myself how I actually want to incorporate blindness into my work. I am not interested into representing a story or a fairytale about blindeness. I guess that the subject itself is a complex one to touch upon in performance and visual arts, where meaning is brought about by the spectator's interpretation of visual and verbal language.

However I am determined to find a way in which to propose blindness within the performative space, where the audiences' eye sight might be challanged. In the meantime I came across an experimental dance performance choreographed and conducted by Berlin based dancer and choreographer Felix Ruckert in 2002.

Secret Service invited the audience to become the centre of a performance piece where dancers blindfolded the audience from the very beginning and led them through a long journey of exploring their body language. The piece consisted of two parts. The audience was introduced to the rules of the piece, blindfolded and led into the performance space by the dancers. From there on, they were to trust their 'guide', their senses, their body impulses. The second part involved taking off clothing and pushing the body to other limits, which doesn't particularly interest me at that point.

What I find interesting about this piece is that it put the audience at the centre of the performance (although credits are given to the dancers that conducted the 'spectator-performer' into the space) and the total privation of seeing, which put the spectators in a position to entirely trust people they don't know.

The originality of the concept of Secret Service lies in the fact that spectators were basically treated as amature dancers. So I imagine this piece very much as a workshop, a trait that I find is becoming more common in performance nowadays. Is this a way of bringing the spectator closer to the performer, making the work more widely accessible and responding to the ever growing needs of spectators to be on equal terms with the performer? Where does a performance stop being one and becomes an open workshop?

Lines line up space (Tate Britain)

2009-11-17T21:16:00.001Z

Last Saturday I went to see the Tate Britain. Of course Tate Modern is the 'coolest' one, and I love dropping by any chance I get. But fortunately, living in London obliges you to visit all the galleries possible. It was great seeing the original 'Ophelia', which was an obvious inspiration to Nick Cave in the nineties for the video of the song 'Where the wild roses grow'. Also I enjoyed some pieces by James Abbott McNeill Whistler, whose work I had only seen in books and on the net. Of course some of the symbology of 16th century British painting seemed quite curious to me as opposed to Italian Renaissance, with which I am much more familiar.

At the moment the Duveen Galleries house a massive site specific installation by Eva Rothschild, called Cold Corners. Twenty-six black triangles of various sizes, made of light black aluminium tube, stretch out the whole length of the gallery. Almost looking like a refined scaffolding, the piece contrasts with the architecture of the space, creating a new space that can be explored from different points of view. The space seems 'outlined' by the black tube triangles, giving the gallery a system for measuring and perceiving chunks of space. The spectator's gaze is directed by these lines and when a 'cold corner' comes along, it seems that we change the direction we are looking in.

Eva Rothschild's work reminded me of a set design technique that Richard Foreman describes in his book 'Unbalancing Acts'. In order to decentralise the spectator's look in one point, which is often the presence of a protagonist, he used pieces of string that accompanied the spectator's gaze to different directions on stage. I found this little detail of great interest as very often playrights tend to concentrate the spectator's attention in one centre point, where the drama takes place. Foreman escapes from this conventional idea by offering the audience to explore the actors' space in different light.

Many artists nowadays use string, plastic, metal and all kinds of materials to draw physical lines in galleries. Some works may be stunning (also due to their dimensions), I saw a huge installation of that kind at the Venice Biennale this year. It has become some sort of 'string fashion', or 'string style art' that may be a little over the top. But if there is a reason behind it, and it works within an exhibition space or a performative venue why not?

Show and Go

2009-11-15T19:33:00.010Z

Our brief shows last Wednesday with David Gale went quite well. It was a great challenge to set up everything in a couple of hours, with the anxiety of taking it all down on time to return all the equipment we had borrowed.

I think all pieces had more or less the same duration, about five minutes. It's amazing how different all four performances were, and yet David really found that we had all worked very well as a team, and that all pieces had something in common.

What we could not have and so did not make use of is lighting. I am sure that our pieces would have been better with a more careful choice of lighting, but in that case we did not have the equipment required, as we were not using the theatre space and also had too little time to try things out. That of course made it easier to make up some creative, low cost techniques. I was happy to use the overhead projector once more, a great device that can be transformed into a very versatile light source. I had the pleasure of learning how to use those with theatre director and visual artist Fabrizio Crisafulli, whose innovative work is appreciated both in Italy and worldwide.

Another technical question in our piece was the video, and as in every performance, things started going wrong minutes before the presentation. But this is a must in theatre, so I guess it brings good luck. It all went smoothly in the end. David's remark about blindness regarding my part of the video (the moving images seen from a train window) reminded me of a patient described in Oliver Sacks' 'The man who mistook his wife for a hat'. A great book by the renowed neurologyst I read some years ago, it is a collection of some amazing short stories that deal with the complexity of our perceptions. The patient I recalled is Ingrid (and I remember the name because this is what I called my bicycle at the time), whose brain perceived images as frames, and although her eye sight was not damaged, she was unable to see continuous, moving images, but rather scattered fragments, like thousands of photograhs recording a singular movement.

Our performances were all recorded, and as soon as I get the chance to edit the videos I will put them up.

A One Week Project

2009-11-09T17:57:00.001Z

Last Wednesday we had a workshop with Dave Gale in the filming studio space, and after a brief talk we were aked to individually write three different parts of three different stories. It was something I hadn't done before, but it was a challenge. I had two hours to create a beginning, a middle and an end for three different stories.

Mr. Gale talked about Jean Luc Goddard's idea of cinema: according to him, all stories had to have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order. I accidentaly saw a short film by Goddard the other day, and noticed that although the story was very simple and it didn't really lead anywhere, it was broken roughly into three parts.

Before lunchtime we were split into groups by a random draw of names (which actually appeared to be the most confusing part of the whole meeting) and we were asked to create a small play for next Wednesday (that is the day after tomorrow).

I happened to be working with Ilka and Marouso, and we have a beginning, a middle and an end. Any combination of the three could have come up (for example, two middles and an end, or a beginning and two ends). Our stories somehow conneceted, and although we seem to have quite a cinematic feeling for the whole thing, we hope to make a good multimedia performance.

We've been working on some video pieces and have the final storyboard for the whole performance.

This is my middle of the story, it's about two men playing cards on a train. It took me the least time to construct and it's quite senseless. Well, it's only part of the story... If put in the right context it will work!

Showing not in Little Britain

2009-11-08T19:53:00.005Z

It's been an intense Friday at Wimbledon College today, happily concluded by a nice get together at the nearby pub. Got to say that British pubs can be quite dull and sad, but if you are with the right company they start looking almost cosy and inviting.

Today we had the lecture theatre booked for the afternoon to use as a performance and exhibiting space, where to show our work to anybody who is around and willing to walk in and have a chat. I found that a great idea and was looking forward to it. It got most of us working really hard to be able to put something up on time, and it was great seeing everybody experimenting and bringing things in.

As regards to my piece I was quite unsure what type of work I should propose. So far I have been reading and writing a lot, accompanied by some sketches and photographs. Exhibiting these would be really lame, as they are just some elements that support my research, but are not quite right to present as a 'sample' of my work. As my interest has shifted from the 'visual' to the 'non visual' or more pricisely to the 'not seen', I asked myself which direction do i take next? Is blindness a theme that I want to use in my work, or is it that certain condition which obliges individuals to use their other senses to the fullest that I want to suggest to the audience? This is why I first thought of a slide show storyboard for a small part of Orhan Pamuk's 'My name is red'. But while sketching I realised it was not the right thing. So if I was to take my 'blind' ideas further, i need to put it into practice. I decided to blindfold myself for an hour or two and 'explore' the works of my colleagues using my other senses, considering essential dialogue. I spent a while to find a simple ribbon to use for the blindfold, so as not to look like a performer who's on about showing something off. It was really to be part of my research.

While everyone was preparing their work to be taken upsatairs, in my effort of not looking around too much before my 'perception exploring', I was doing some experiments with a small torch, trying to create only a small dot of light. I tryed putting on 'blinds' on the glass bit of it, with tiny holes, but the effect was still that of the diffusing light that a torch normally has. That's until I got Esteban to have a look and he suggested I make a long cone, attach it to the torch and then block it with a 'blind'. Great, it worked! But the torch didn't look like a flashlight anymore, it was half a meter long and looked like a small kalashnikov. Looking through the small hole on the blind with the light on, it created a really nice tunnel effect, so I made a black paper container for it, through which people can look. It wasn't gonna take long, and it was something I could show as well. While finishing it off, I was surprised by my colleagues who announced that we don't have the space which had been booked for us. Quite literally we had been kicked out, and for this kind of school and standards that is unacceptable.

Where things went from there is something I will go back to in another post. Good thing was we had a new group meeting to discuss our priorities and needs as students who are part of Wimbledon College. For as much as this country has hit us with a culture shock, it's good to know where we stand.

This is where the magic happens! And it's a miracle as well, just picture nearly 16 of us there making performance in that space...

Ant

2009-11-04T20:12:00.000Z

While writing 'insignificant' for the picture of the previous post, while not having space to fit it the whole word on one line I had to take a second one for 'ant' and just realised that an ant does have to do with insignificance. Not that ants are insignificant to our world, but for their size, they are (and probably would feel, if they could feel like us) quite insignificant, as opposed to the sizes and dimensions of our (in/human) world.

Insignificant timing

2009-11-04T19:57:00.002Z

These days things are happening faster than what I can realise, let alone write about. But in the effort of keeping the blog updated according to 'VLP regulations' I might as well start by intruducing the new project we are working on.

There is already a new joint project our group is working on, and it's been less than a week that we finished the climate change projection. This obviously doesn't leavs us with much time for our individual research, but it's a great way of training not only your flow of ideas and technical possibilities, but also your way of coping with so many things at the same time. It is not easy working on a few projects altogether and running after tight deadlines without mixing concepts and at the same time keeping a high level of professionalism.

'Insignificance' is one of the four themes we are to develop on a performative level for a show taking place in December. It is only two of us working on that one, so it's another kind of collaboration, probably a more complicated one. When you work with many people you know you are bound to give up on some ideas and embrace others, while if you only got one partner then it's harder to hold back what you might not agree on.

Probably 'Insignificance' is the most difficult of all four themes not becasue of what it means (or doesn't mean) but of the context we are to put it in: performance. The whole act of performing is about communicationg an idea, however simple it may be, but when you are to communicate something that is insignificant itself that becomes a challenging task. Maybe also due to the fact that insignificance is a realtive term: what is significant to me might be totally insignificant to somebody else, and things assume their 'insignificance' in relation to place, time and taste.

The first thing that came to mind, considering we are to perform, was the repetition of a simple routine movement. Not particularly complex movements, if repeated over and over again tend to lose their meaning and purpose somehow. They say that 'practice makes perfect', or that 'repetition is the mother of knowledge', and that would completely prove me wrong, but in theatre, where timing is to be taken into consideration (say a show has a duration of thirty minutes for example) I, as part of an audience, would expect some kind of development or plot to unfold. If a performer raises their hand and then drops it, for half and hour, repeating always the same exact movement, doing nothing else, I would have no doubt that the only thing that he is trying to say is that he doesn't care. And that goes quite close to insignificance.

Another idea was to try and make a list of insignificant things we do every day. But I guess we make the best of our time, isn't it? We do insignifiact things, but that's only becasue the others notice them, they are not insignificant to us.

My work partner suggested we take a picture every day, at the same time, and then look at them later on together. That seemed like an interesting idea, but I thought that setting a certain time for taking a photo would actually give us time to think about what we photograph and so give a mening to it. I suggested that we carry our cameras with us and call each other randomly, just saying 'Take a pic!'. This would definitely be taking pictures of unexpected things and it's also fun. It surprised me that this seemed probably a bit invasive to her, however we exchanged numbers and will give it a shot.

Let's see where it takes us.

Distortions

2009-11-04T01:23:00.002Z

Few days ago I came across an excerpt from an eighty's Japanese tv show by, although still not at the time, great film director and versatile artist Takeshi Kitano. He had the idea of playing with people's vision in relation to their body movements and reactions. Even though we must bear in mind that it was originally created for tv entertainment, the video shows the artist's interest in the deformation of human vision.

What he did was organise a football game, where players simply had to wear a pair of binoculars. Over twnty years after its release, this video is great fun!

An essay on blindness

2009-11-01T23:15:00.001Z

As I have been currently interested in blindness, more precisely by its different interpretation by non blind authors, I remembered another novel I'd come across a few years ago- Blindness, by Portugese author Jose Saramago.

It tells the story of an imaginary city hit by a blindness pandemic, progressively afflicting all its inhabitants and leading to a major social breakdown. Although I found Saramago's style too descriptive and explicit, the story really put me in a position to imagine what life would be like if we all started losing our eye sight one by one. Consequences would be way beyond simply not seeing the outside world.

So happy together!

2009-10-31T00:23:00.001Z

Performance is also about working as a team, and that is what we had been doing for the last two weeks, in collaboration with Douglas (our course leader). He had decided to involve us in his project for the Gradute School Festival, and that was really a great 'beginning of the year' opportunity for us to get to know each other better and work together.

As we all come form different backgorunds it has been interesting to see how everyone approaches a certain issue, be it a cenceptual or a techinical one. I feel that communication between us has become more effective, considering that we are a very international group, where a lot of languages mingle together, which is a great thing, but it may get in the way when one is trying to make a statement. I guess throughout this petite experience we have developed our unique language, after all the final piece came out quite well, considering the amount of time we had for preparation, the technical devices available, and the space we share with a lot of colleagues, who had other projects to work on.

Of course we have had our moments of misunderstanding, disagreement and simply ignoring a situation when it all got too much. But at the end of the day you feel closer to someone if you had the courage to tell them off about something. We all know that when the clock is ticking and things need to be done one has to simply act.

The theme for the piece, which was mainly a video projection on the outside of the MA building of our college, with some shadow theatre play projected from teh inside, was climate change. That seems to be currently a very popular theme, however we believe that despite its exagerrated use we managed to put together some ideas that went beyond the main theme and so the piece was accessible to a wide audience.

So thank you VLPs for the wonderful experience, and looking forward to working with you again... that shouldn't be long, so on second thought, let's concentrate on our projects for now!

Some like it blind

2009-10-30T09:24:00.000Z

Last Friday Amanda Beech gave a lecture on neutrality at Wimbledon College of Art. She discussed on different theories and philosophers, such as Theodor Adorno and Maurice Blanchot. Amanda started off by talking about the tragic story of Oedipus, arguing that in this case knowledge and innocence are closely associated with power and violence. Of course hadn't Oedipus come to learn the truth about his parents and what he had done without knowing, he wouldn't have blinded himself.

The image that was before us for quite a while was the figure (of Oedipus) with its hands tense and eyes bleeding, obviously just as he blinded himself.

What struck me most about Oedipus was his choice of punishing himself. One would generally expect that the worst punishment that one chooses, after realising the terrible things they have done is to end their life. But Oedipus chooses to continue living, and suffering for his past actions, living in eternal darkness, unable to see the external world.

This reminded me, although in different perspective, of Orhan Pamuk's great masterpiece 'My name is Red', which tells the story of a misterious murder in a circle of Ottoman miniaturists of the 16th century. Apart from the fact that the novel is written in a an elaborate manner, keeping the reader always in suspence, it contains a great deal of insight on the philosophy of life of those artists. In their attention for the mastery of minute details, their excellent vision was of vital importance, especially as young apprentices. As they grew older and therefore more experienced in their specific field of drawing or colouring it was expected that with time, they would slowly become blind due to the 'exhaustion' of the eye. Not only was that a sign of great mastery, but it was considered a blessing from God (Allah) who granted those who had served him faithfully all their life the gift of seeing the world through His eyes, far from the earthly beauties we see with our eyes, but in the eternal world of darkness.

I found it amazing that artists, whose eye sight was so vital, embarked on a journey that was to take it away form them, and that was considered the most precious reward. Some would deliberately blind themsleves after a long career as miniaturists, and they would still continue drawing and painting, as by that time they had mastered the art so well they could do it without even looking. To produce visual Art they no longer need to be able to see the outside world, but the darkness that not many are entitled to in the world of the living.

See- Saw -Seen

2009-10-24T17:19:00.000+01:00

Any performance, for as much as it can be based on verbal interaction, or any work af Art, whether we are perofrming or watching, it requires first and foremost our ability to see. As simple as it may seem, we need our eyesight. I have been terrified at the thought of losing my sight; what would happen then? Would I still be able to create something which is meant to be seen and experienced as visual? Everything around us is visual. And yet the lastest film by Spanish director Pedro Almadovar, 'Los Abrazos rotos' (Broken embraces) tells the tragic story of a film director who kept on writing scripts, despite the loss of his eyesight in a car accident. Not to ruin you a night at the cinema, but the most striking thing about it is that he edits his best film ever as a blind man. Yes, his visual masterpiece of cinema is something he would never see. But would it have been his masterpiece if the shooting hadn't taken place when he could still see?

Live vs Mediatized

2009-10-20T00:22:00.000+01:00

Which one was to be my fist book from the 'essential' list this term? Got quite a few of them at home, they are all brand new, with beautiful covers and almost all of them have the word 'performance' in their title, so it's really my perfect reading. My eye fell on Paul Auslander's 'LIVENESS Performance in a mediatized culture'. 'Liveness' suggested something playful and yet the cover of the book is almost austere: a dark theatre, with its traditional red seats, all empty. Impossible to say if that is before or after a performance, but it was certainly a great book to examine some aspects of the mechanism and development of performance in the contemporary world.

As performance artists, although we perennially co-exist with the digital reality, of today, when it comes to creating a piece we use digital technology as a tool to get the desired effects, rather than recognising it as an integrated element of the whole. The audience is mainly made up of people who grew up watching tv programs, go regularly to the cinema, or at least if they don't, they download movies and all kinds of software form the internet. They look at a medium of three hundred ads a day, according to recent statistics, they meet friends and relatives online every day and many of them skype their partner on the other end of the world before going to sleep; then wake up with a morning tv program, the radio, jogging with their ipod and checking emails. Well we are certainly going beyond this with technology nowadays, but that is not the point. It is simply clear that we are all part of a complex mediatized network that has kept on developing since the arrival of television. Our everyday use of technology is no longer simply a tool for our jobs, it's not even just a necessity. It's part of our existence and I would dare to consider that we are loving it, despite complaining of this 'digital world that's going faster and faster'. Undoubtedly, we very well know we cannot survive without it.

So if this is our audience, how can we expect it to understand the 'magic' of theatre? I always thought that was the difference between any mediatized event (from tv recorded programs to global live events being transmitted online) and live performance. The presence of an actor and his direct and physical relationship to the audience is still considered by many the principle characteristic of live performance, that makes it so unique. But can we accept this view, given the mediatized world which we live in? Can we really expect the audience to 'feel' the magic of theatre or live performance, without taking into consideration their visual, psychological and structural surroundings, their broad perception of relationships and comunication?

It can be argued that the physical presence of the audience as a whole, as a collective group that is present at one single event, is another trait that renders live performance such a unique experience. And I would gladly agree to that, but it is also true that we have in mediatized performances we have the same audiences as in live performance. Auslander is right in saying that 'mediatized performance makes just as effective a focal point for the gathering of a social group as live performance'. There is certainly a difference between the two, but not necessarily one of quality or originality. Further, we are able to discuss a mediatized piece in real time while generally at the theatre comments and thoughts are shared after the performance is over, which obviously takes away of the authenticity of the performance as comments are based on something that has already vanished and referring to what is already gone would mean reframing it in some way, paraphrasing it.

Going back to the relationship spectator- performer, we must recognise that theatre or any other kind of performance is made up of two elements: the actor and the spectator. If we go to see a live performance don't we expect to get more than seeing it on television for example? Blau argues, very reasonably in my opinion, that the very experience of live performance creates a desire for community, which can be hardly satisfied given that performance is founded on difference and separation. For as much as the barrier between spectator and performer is narrowing in contemporary experimental theatre and performance, as long as we are talking about performance, there will always be those two 'opposites': the one who performs and the one who watches. Auslander takes Blau's argument further, stating that while we are unable to satisfy our longing for community between actor and audience in live performance, we tend to feel more comfortable and socially integrated within the audience in the case of mediatized performance.

Nothing is going to substitute going to the theatre, just as nothing will replace the commodity of enjoying a recorded performance at home in the company of friends or watching a live transmission of an event on a massive screen in a crowded city square. But we'd better get used to considering those two different options, both of which offer unique possibilities of perception, only in different ways.

If you choose so (First time at the Royal Court Theatre)

2009-10-11T17:56:00.000+01:00

After a tiring day of tube orienteering, city trekking and visiting exhibitions around London, our MA group went to see 'The Author', directed by Tim Crouch at the Royal Court theatre last week. I didn't know him till then and think this was a good piece for me to be introduced to his work. The structure of the performance and its presentation didn't quite give me a clear idea of what Crouch's work is all about, which is a good sign; meaning I might go back to see his next play.

Climbing up the stairs to get to the top floor, where the Jerwood Theatre is situated, quite gave the impression that the place we would have arrived at was some sort of a big attic transformed into a theatre space. As we entered I was not surprised that it was so, only when we had to take a seat I realised I mustn't be having any further expectations of what was about to happen. The seats were arranged in such a way so that one half of the audience was facing the other, while in the middle was a very narrow passage, which could hardly be called a stage. So there we were, inevitably staring at each other, chatting away, laughing and waiting for the performance to start.

Well at this point that could already be called a performance, since we were put in a pre-defined space and therefore forced to create some form of interaction different to the one created in a more traditional theatre. As we already had an object in front of our eyes, that might as well have been the subject of the show.

An expansive voice attracted our attention so there goes the first performer. He was not visible, or at least not to the whole audience, although one could sense he was certainly amongst us. An informal conversation was rapidly wound up as the actor threw compliments at us and picked a few people to share something about themselves. So was that a discussion group now? I still hadn't seen his face when another one cut in, and there he was, sitting amongst the audience just infront of me. And then again a third one spoke, behind the second, and then a lady, just behind me, had her story to tell.
What I found interesting was the fact that you were not expected to look at the actors, as some of them were behind you. Soon, it was a matter of choice looking at the ones in front of you as well, you could easily just look around the audience, take notes or even read a book, as during most of the performance there was a uniform light spreading in the whole space.

Four actors, engaged in a conversation, telling a story of scattered pieces, discussing their experience with handling the performance of and relation to violence, hope, choice. They were clearly acting, but as they searched every now and then for the audiences' approval it became more natural that we were all gathred together; so much that after a while it felt like being in a theatre workshop rather than a formally announced performance.

It was natural to leave the stage, shortly after the actors did. It had indeed been an interesting encounter, a hybrid between theatre, performance and a discussion group that could have engaged you emotionally, only if you chose so of course.

Me? A Blogger? Why?

2009-10-11T16:48:00.000+01:00

I guess most people open a blog when they feel a certain urge to broaden even further their ways of sharing information, exchanging ideas, meeting new people, showing off with something, pretending to be someone else. I once followed, for a short while, a couple of blogs, enjoyed the daily newsfeed, but as I wasn't a blogger and couldn't comment on the articles published, my acquintance with them ended very quickly. I didn't have a good enough reason to start my own blog at the time, and I certainly didn't feel comfortable writing something that everyone could see.

Well, today I have a good reason to 'open' this blog: I am back to school and I need my journal. Yes, we all had journals at school, only this time the journey I am embarking on is MA VLP, and times have no doubt changed since I went to high school and wrote little notes in paper journals. Well with this blog not only will I save lots of paper but put my ideas forward to be shared, critiqued and commented on.

VLP stands for Visual Language of Performance.