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Talking about myself - fine. Talking about myself as an artist - much more difficult. My script and the stills from giving my first ever Artist Talk reveal my tentative approach to this task...   Can I call myself an artist? If so, what do I want my art to say? What is my identity as a performer? Looking back to my original artist statement on the home page of my website, I am embarrassed. It seems very naive. The Performance Lab has challenged me to reconsider my identity as a performer, to see myself as an artist. It has led to me exploring in depth, and sometimes painfully, ‘the argument that performance functions as a useful and rigorous means of engaging with different kinds of knowledge, including those that might not be otherwise accessible.’ I have had to examine the value of pain, both physical and psychological, in researching and devising performance. My body has recalled a maelstrom of gymnastic and dance routines; Feldenkrais, tai chi, yoga and capoeira moves; the stillness learnt from life-modelling and theatre tricks like how to stand in the light so your face is illuminated (or not). I have remembered how to sing in my own voice again.  The FADS space was like coming home. I bask in it. It is a space were I can play, take risks and it has very pleasing tech. The lighting rig graces the header on my homepage and has even been a character in one of my films, embodying a safe environment.  Learning more about live art has been a revelation. LADA a haven. There is a bibliography of some of my early influences as well as my new discoveries on the scrapbook page. I have tried to add hyperlinks where I can as references, click to find out more. How the Performance Lab process unfolded: (click on the week to access the blog post) Week 1 Theatre as a context for experimentation Week 2 Selina Thompson, I was gutted to miss this but the family wedding took priority and was suitably fabulous. Researched Selina’s work, read salt . Impressed and inspired. Week 3 Playwriting, storytelling and adapting Week 4 Modes of performance Week 5 Pushing form further Week 6. Action Lab #1 Week 7. Reading week Week 8. Staging work - pitching and All Goes to Pot Week 9 Running workshops and sharing your practice Week 10 Jay Miller and The Yard Theatre Week 11 Action Lab #2 So where to next? That is what the coming semester is for. I am confused and that is perfectly acceptable. More dance, more stillness, more song and more silence. Today it seems as though live art is where I fit, but I celebrate that theatre is where I am from.
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Once I had worked out I was going to build on the piece recharging from Week 8 and the poem ‘skinless’ for the second Action Lab, I realised I had a lot of physical work to do. I wanted to combine autobiographical, voiced, direct to audience material with a film that referenced my stay at Our Lady. I decided to allude to domestic violence but coded in repetitive movement performed in front of video on the large film screen. To get the movements crisp enough feel they represented what I wanted to say, I put in hours of rehearsal and felt grateful for my body remembering how to work hard. I was inspired by a section of Douglas Wright’s Elegy:  I reused some of the film I had shot at the Our Lady Hospital and had edited for Week 4. I combined it with the split screen, black and white film skin from Week 6 - images of the FADS lighting rig, inhospitable environments and the stills of my back to reinforce the vulnerability I had felt as a result of PTSD. I recorded a voice over of the more ‘difficult’ verbal content to contrast with the conversational tone at the start of the piece. I bookended the audio on the video with an a cappella version of ‘Twinkle, twinkle little star’ - this has become a touchstone for me, or maybe an unnecessary security blanket. The first visuals were old TV screens and a cassette recorder, images that are a metaphor for both ‘screening’ and ‘reliving/recording’ emotional content. Using an iPad and iMovie was challenging to create the audiovisual content that I wanted but I got there in the end:
When I transferred the video to be able to project it from the mezzanine at a prearranged verbal cue it corrupted - we didn’t know this until it played and it worked really well. Serendipitous, surrealist gremlins. Thanks to the spirit of Leonora Carrington. By this stage in the process of making performances I was wondering if my practice lay more at the live art end of the spectrum and I had to decided to take a risk and combine the rough texture of the large pine box in FADS with the vulnerable naked back as a physical representation of the ‘box’ I was meant to use as advised by one counsellor to enclose my feelings when they were overwhelming. Disrobing with my back to the audience I then stepped into the box and very slowly moved down into the vulnerable foetal position with a black screen, the poem skinless as a voice over, black screen and a ‘special’ side spot to cross illuminate the box. Jules Deering, our ever helpful technician, helped work out the best angle for this. He also helped me work out the best wash for the beginning of the piece. He got it immediately when I said, tongue only partially in cheek, that I wanted a feeling of Dave Allen crossed with Marina Abromovic. Despite not being able to execute the dance homage to Doug Wright with quite the finesse I was after, this is the performance piece of which I am most proud. It was very scary to do. Reflecting on it now a few weeks later I have even enjoyed going over my choreography notes, verbal text and physical script. The process is as chaotic as ever, but this time the execution came closer to my imagined product: Week 9 (21 November 2019) focussed on ‘Running Workshops and Sharing Your Practice - How best to construct and run a workshop’ Deborah Pearson based our workshop demonstration on devising work she had done with Frantic Assembly. We all had to share something we had noticed that morning. As usual even though there are only four of us in the room we report back a wonderful range of stimuli: Deborah’s ‘invisible writing on the door’, Bim noticing people smiling on the tube, Dee’s comments on the oiliness of pesto and my shiny city at the end of Mile End Rd. Gradually revealing the structure of the workshop as a practical demonstration of not giving “all the info at once”, we went through three more steps devising a performance piece: initially with an infinite budget and resources so we had ‘weirdly low stakes’, then a £50,000 budget and FADS as a site, then only £50 and a site to be negotiated with QMUL. My sketchbook records the process more vividly: By integrating participation in the workshop with a meta-description of the process we were reminded of some of the original advice Deborah had given us about ‘not showing all your teeth’ - by drip feeding the instructions the workshop facilitator can structure the day to build like a satisfying narrative, enhance collaboration and dispel anxiety about building something from nothing. Week 10 (28 November 2019) was a chance to meet with Jay Miller, artistic director of The Yard. A brilliant opportunity to not only discuss the most recent play he had directed there, Clare Barron’s, Dirty Crusty but also talk about local engagement and the way the theatre and its rehearsal space are used community. I had been very impressed with The Yard when I made my first visit there to see Dirty Crusty so it was a privilege to be able to speak with Jay about the production and how to make a small socially engaged space work artistically and ethically.  Staging Work - Arts Council Grants, Self Curation, Fringe Models, Pitch Meetings - How do you get your work on and support other artists to get their work on? Paraphrasing Deborah from our pitching conversation: When pitching, get to the most exciting and interesting thing as quickly as possible. Tread a strange line between confidence and openness to new ideas. What words will the venue find poisonous? Almost like suggesting clothes for friends - cool to offer something they might like but aren’t doing yet.  In our student led practice that afternoon we worked on coming up with a way we could showcase each others’ work - we embraced the idea of a DIY/punk approach. Quite some time was spent on costuming before we had finalised anything else! We were envisioning an alternative cabaret with the return of Minnie and the Monotones in a new guise based on the fact that we can all sing. Bim (AKA Triple A) would research the history of our venue, hopefully The Mermaid in Clapton Pond and make a site specific response. Monty would either reprise his monologue or do his vampire song (or both). Dee would MC in platforms. I was able to sound the venue out initially that night, but didn’t want to make a formal pitch until I knew we were all up for it.
Week 7 was reading week. It came around too quickly for me. I end up rehearsing in all sorts of odd spaces because I find the journey to QMUL too daunting. Yet when I have to be there for either a seminar or a performance I overcome my heebie-jeebies, taking deep breaths despite the smell of bodies on the tube and ignoring my racing heart. I have little patience with myself for finding tube travel daunting, probably because I feel guilty for mocking other people who have suffered when I have found the tube easy. Still obsessing about the back image.  Using this image both live and recorded seems integral to what I want to say about vulnerability and strength. During Reading Week I thought a lot about Lizard Boy. Two months later I am still not ready to properly process or write about what happened there. I have already written about Week 8 - scroll down to my post from November 17th. Looking back to that performance I am glad to have experimented with using a screen as part of the set. It helped germinate the idea not just of using multiple screens, but also reinforced employing whatever is available as furniture and props. Using the large wooden box in FADS was linked to me climbing on to the television cabinet.  Action Lab #1 Performed - Pushing Form Further And Lizard Boy The question we had to consider was - how can you collide this with another form? We were to think about how content dictates form. My text for the performance went as follows: Twinkle, twinkle little star sung a cappella and syncopated Film starts, breath I spoke, about, talked about, losing the power of speech recently. It was weird it was something I had forgotten about. How can you forget such a thing? Then I remember how many things I forget. And have forgotten. Breath, one long sigh When the image of my back in the mezzanine of FADS comes on to the scene, recite skinless poem: When I am skinless When my skin is so thin Thinner than membrane under eggshell Thinner than clingfilm glad warp cellophane Thinner than the skin between the layers of an onion Then I am fragile frail feeble Then I have no voice When poem finishes, 3 slow breaths and drill sound. Drill sound goes on for longer than is comfortable. Then final rendition of Twinkle, twinkle little star ………… Exploring the idea of “how it feels to give voice to voicelessness”, I feel am still tiptoeing around rather than 'digging deep'. I am not sure I am ready or willing to talk about Lizard Boy yet. Pushing Form Further (taught topic). Performing as the self performance
Reflecting on weeks 4 and 5 was challenging. Grappling with embarrassment and fear of failure has always been one of my challenges as a performer, one I share with most people with a heartbeat I suppose. In trying to create a safe space I had ended up with a bit of a mess. Mmmm. Structure. My bête noir. Why my novel is languishing in the drawer and why my life has had tendencies towards the chaotic. Mmmm. My usual anarchic response of scribbling frantically and throwing everything I have to hand at my storyline had resulted in a performance that lacked a really coherent structure. It had been useful as a reassurance that being experimental was the whole point of the lab but I was still ashamed that what I was producing was less than fabulous. For our next performance we were asked to think about performing a live event unfolding in real time, colliding it with other media. The primary focus should be on how we could perform the self. Jordan challenged us to dig deep. Mmmm. I decided to look into my past and chose a range of images and some video footage from Our Lady’s Psychiatric Hospital in County Clare which is now abandoned. I asked Sue Curnow, a friend with extensive experience as an actor, to talk to me about voice and recorded it. This recording I used as the soundtrack for a film which combined photos of the hospital itself, the statue commemorating the life of the hospital and the statue of the Virgin Mary in the grounds. I tried to post the first part of this blog yesterday at the beginning of the post below. My web design skills must be still somewhat lacking, or gremlins interfered, as it disappeared into the ether!    My daughter, Rosa, appears just at the end of one section of the video footage so I checked with her if she was OK with me using it. She was but didn’t want to see the resulting video. We had shed tears and shared hugs when we had visited the derelict site of Our Lady’s. She had been there with me as a very small baby when I was a patient.  I called the piece “Who we are/Where we are” and started with a direct address to the audience.
This is the text of my introduction: Hello, Kia Ora When the idea of this task was introduced, I freaked out a bit because voice can be problematic for me Once when I was very poorly I became selectively mute. Briefly. There was no physiological reason for me to stop speaking. I just did. (move from centre stage left to centre stage right) When I am skinless when my skin is so thin Thinner than membrane under eggshell than cling film gladwrap cellophane than the membrane between the layers of an onion Then I am fragile frail feeble Then I have no voice (play video of Our Lady Hospital with Sue Curnow’s voice over, chorusing with her from “we project ourselves”. When the video stops I carry on speaking Sue’s transcribed script bringing the recorded sound and content completely live into the space. Slowly I repeat key phrases) the voice identity our history our genetic make up we project ourselves making concrete (in our heads) tied up with who we are where we are It went OK. I was proud of making myself vulnerable and being brave. Less proud of the execution, but once again had to remind myself of the experimental nature of the space. This was the first performance I would be producing with a week to prepare and a specific brief. A piece to be performed in front of my peer group and Jordan Tannahill, who I had yet to meet and was already a little in awe of. No pressure then. As well as conforming to the ‘create something with a beginning, middle and end’ brief I wanted to relish the idea of the FADS safe space. I wanted to share the feeling of joy I found in having a “black box” space to play in - its technical possibilities and giant screen as well as the performance area itself. I wanted to create a tour through the safe space that the Film and Drama Studio (FADS) provides for experimentation - with a few thrills thrown in. I was later to question the sensitivity of my personal audience barometer re ‘thrill’. This was because I recalled the moment in our first student led practice (SLP) when I freaked my fellow students out a bit. I had been trying to illustrate a change of tone or mood in an a capella song, and segued from a lyrical version of Let It Be into a very loud punk version without warning. Everyone had jumped - and not necessarily in a good way. Jordan Tannahill writes on p47 of Theatre for the Unimpressed, ‘There seemed to be something intuitive about asking a group of our friends to come together and bring this thing to life.’ And on the same page, ‘The opportunity for friends to gather together to hear each other say beautiful and strange words.’ Now although these comments are about the development and staging of All Our Happy Days Are Stupid, the concept worked for me. I wanted to make something to solidify the relationship that was growing between the Performance Lab members and to greet and welcome Jordan Tannahill into our working space. A bit auntie-ish, but why change the habits of a life time? (That provoked an instant aside from my inner critic making an apposite and overly sarcastic comment about “just how useful many of those habits are”. I ignore it) In addition to voice memos and an awful lot of wittering in my head I produce a rough handwritten script:
 My performance needs a kettle, an iron, handkerchiefs, a small portable record player and a selection of 7” vinyl singles. And hats. Not too complicated then.  
We went upstairs to the next floor and entered FADS through “Technical Control”. I was still in the role of facilitator. Once I had developed the idea that space was the beginning of the magic we could all make here we moved to the first of the less gentle thrills. The technician’s caged ladder from the mezzanine to stage level. I offered the lift as an alternative to climbing down but everyone braved the ladder. In terms of structure this is where it all got a bit messy. My intention had been to provide something gentle to thrill each of the five senses: tea for taste, a freshly ironed linen hankie for smell and touch, a selection of tunes to delight the ear and some mad hats to engage the eye. My purpose was to share tangible experiences that would open out the possibilities of the ways you could engage participants in the space. As I say - it all got a bit messy. Timing tea and ironing was more complicated than I had allowed for and my instructions/invitations lacked the clarity and elegance I would liked. Luckily my participants were game and as well as joining in the wearing of hats and choosing of tunes they were kind when it came to commenting later. The structure that I had intended to indicate a beginning (the technical capabilities of FADS upstairs in the mezzanine), followed by a middle on stage (exploring how we could thrill the senses in the performance space) and then an end in which we would all feel that the space was a supportive one to jump off and experiment, was weak. At least everyone looked fabulous in the hats.   This week’s focus was playwriting, storytelling and adapting. Working through my own ideas before this session I had recorded some voice memos as an alternative to writing. In one labeled ‘Silver Swan’ I reference Spalding Gray. Swimming to Cambodia had such a profound effect on me when I first saw it. I had loved Jonathan Demme’s film Stop Making Sense, but Spalding Gray was influential on my young artist self in so many ways. Here was an actor using autobiographical material and being political in a really intelligent, humorous and engaging way. I almost wanted to be him. Swimming to Cambodia even had music by Laurie Anderson who was, and is still, a goddess. Having missed week 2 with Selina Thompson it was fascinating to watch the performances Bim and Monty had devised. Bim used a semi-Swimming to Cambodia desk as part of her set and took a naturalistic tale to superbly surreal extremes. Ladybirds haunted me for days. Monty had rehearsed a repetitive digging movement to a realistic soundtrack, synchronizing his movement in a very satisfying way. Following the nursery rhyme prompt I improvised a macabre version of the ‘Wind the Bobbin Up’. After feeding back Deborah produced some scripts for us to peruse. I snaffled a copy of The Future Show and here was another Spalding Gray reference. Exploring these texts Deborah described differing approaches to writing texts: ‘a play is an object in and of itself’, ‘a generalized imprint’. A performance text on the other hand is a ‘blueprint for you’.
Our homework, apart from reading the introduction to Jordan Tannahill’sTheatre of the Unimpressed, was to create something with a beginning a middle and an end. The aim would be to challenge the audience with what signifies these moments. When does the performance start? How do we know it has ended? The challenges I faced doing this are the subject of the next blog. I’m finding writing about it super scary. At least I have plentiful notes. |
Viv HarrisNotes from FADS sessions Archives
January 2020
QMUL Perf Lab
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veteran performer recharging
photo credit: Julia Fąfara