Community has been the reoccurring topic that we have all agreed that we want to focus on and expand on. As ‘Community’ is such a broad term, we wanted to focus on how people around Lincoln are doing nice things to help the Community as whole. An example of this is looking into how people help the homeless people around Lincoln by giving them food. Another example is people washing off all the Graffiti off of the Cities walls to make it nice for the rest of the Community to see. We was all interested in this aspect, purely because of all the negative things you hear on Television, Newspapers and magazines and you never seem to hear or read about the nice things about the Community.
Further development progressed through the use of research and trial and error experiments. These experiments will be an on going cycle that will help us frame our final performance. Our technique is to try various ideas out and dismiss any that did not work out how we would have liked it to. As we aim to have 100% audience participation, these experiments will underline which scenarios are the most successful with our audience. The ideas of these tasks we set ourselves were inspiration from Improv Everywhere and Lone Twin and also our own interrelated ideas that branched off from these.
Improv Everywhere ‘is a New York City-based prank collective that causes scenes of chaos and joy in public places. Created in August of 2001 by Charlie Todd, Improv Everywhere has executed over 100 missions involving tens of thousands of undercover agents.’ http://improveverywhere.com
This company created a performance called Say Something Nice. This performance was also 100% audience participation and enables the audience to go up to a megaphone and say something nice to the whole of New York City. This is an interesting idea to see if by having no one around actually advising you to do something, instead there was just a sign asking you to say something nice. This was discussed within our group to see if the people who were directly asked to say something nice felt patronised by us so that is why they didn’t want to do so. This is something that stood out for me, as people are just making someone else’s day by simply saying what they like about them or how they feel.
We went into Lincoln City centre to see if people would say something nice whilst I recorded it onto my phone. Many people did find it very hard to say something nice but others after persuasion managed to think of something we could record. We concluded that it would be easy for the audience to participate if we did not ask them directly and was a simple stand with ‘say something nice’ labelled on it, so the audience could chose whether or not they would want to say something or not.
Here is the video that we took inspiration from:
These are a few things that people said in Lincoln City centre:
-Have a nice day
-You’re hat is really nice and it really suits you.
-I had a really nice day on Saturday, I woke up had my breakfast and watched the cricket all day and went to bed a happy content person.
-I’m really looking forward to finish work today because I am going to treat myself to this really nice eye shadow I saw the other day.
-You’re looking beautiful today, beautiful.
-That girl over there is very hot.
-I like your coat.
-You have a really nice smile.
We then tried out various ways that shows how nice our community can be towards other members of public so we decided to film myself falling over in public to see if any of the public will help me up or see if I am okay. Here is a video of myself falling over in Lincoln Town centre and two members of public asking me if I was okay and even helping me get to my feet by lending me her arm to lean on.
This experiment allowed us to see how nice people can be towards other people even complete strangers. This inspired our group to incorporate a similar idea in our final multimedia performance.
Our installation will have a have ten pictures of each member of the group hung down from the ceiling and we individually write down things we do not particularly like about our body. The audience will be then asked to think about their bodies and think not only about the bad things about their bodies but the good things also. The audience will be asked to look at our pictures and read what we have put negative about them and ask them if they would like to ‘say something nice’ about our pictures.
This exercise is not only to get people to say something nice about us but it shows how nice people can be to others or say what they are thinking. Normally lots of things run through your mind when you see a picture but never have the chance to say it out loud or in this case write it down for us to read afterwards. ‘Sometimes your subconscious alights on a certain image, on a certain face in a photograph which becomes fixed in your memory’ (Abromovic, p.1). This quote is relevant for our photo exercise as each person will think completely different things out from the picture than the next person. By getting our audience to write their thoughts down will allow us to see the contrast of responses we receive from our audience’s members and maybe the outcome will be that us as performers will feel happier about how we personally feel about ourselves.
Abramovic, Marina (1995) Cleaning the House, Academy Editions, London.