For today’s practical session (28th January 2013) we were all asked to create / bring in a box that contained a memory. This memory was allowed to be anything at all.
The whole class brought in a variety of different styles of boxes like shoe boxes, jewellery boxes, wooden boxes and many others consisting of all different shapes and sizes. Some boxes had relevance to the memory that was inside whilst others didn’t.
One member of the class created a box /cube out of CD albums that were by some of her favourite artists who she had seen live. Another member of the class created a box out of pieces of card set up in a scene to remember a trip to London they had taken with friends and marked out all of the iconic places they has visited. Everybody’s memory was important to them in their own way, making it special and unique to them where as to somebody else it could just be a unanimous random object.
The whole purpose of this activity was to help show us that a performance can be created/started from anything, anything at all, even something as simple as a memory.
Richard Schechner believes their are several functions that make up a performance. These are ‘To entertain, to make something that is beautiful, to make or change identity, to make or foster community, to heal, to teach, persuade or convince and to deal with the sacred and / or demonic’ ( 2002, p.46).
Work Cited:
Schechner, Richard (2002) Performance Studies: an introduction, London: Routledge.