Influencial performances

Franko B, a London based performance artist, devised a piece of work called I miss you. Similarly to our installation, this piece of work focuses on the interaction between the artist and the audience. Even though both of our pieces don’t have any verbal dialogue, it demands on the audiences own interpretation of the piece. As our performance focuses on the mood of individuals, we hope that our installation allows the audience to feel free to express their own moods and feelings within our five installation sections; painting, smashing crockery, sensory deprivation, say something nice and expressing their moods through music.

The inspiration I received from this performance is the fact that, even though Franko B is naked, each and every audience member will receive different emotions towards the piece. Jennifer Doyle’s review on I Miss You states that the audience’s emotions can range from, ‘finding ourselves crying, laughing, afraid, disgusted, aroused, outraged’ (2011)Accessed at: http://www.franko-b.com/text3.htm

As this piece focuses on the body, and also has aspects of cause and effects within the piece due to the cutting and bleeding on stage as he walks up and down the cat-walk. This for me is very disturbing to see but then again, I did not get bored or uninterested, I wanted to watch more. Even though he repeats his movements for the whole duration, I still found it very inspiring. This could be very mood changing also, in the opposite way that we are trying to create.

 

Yves Klein- Blue

This performance was by a French Artist called Yves Klein. This performance had women sat in a huge tray of Blue paint, painting their bodies blue; Over and over again. They then go and leave their imprint onto a blank canvas. This performance was focussed on the colour Blue and what it meant to one specific person. This performance made me think about how our piece could incorporate this into our installation. Then we realised that if we painted our bodies and canvases it would represent a fun childhood memory. We have been discussing that myself and Chelsea would paint our bodies and canvases during the piece to express the moods we are personally feeling.

Dallae bae, Drawing body painting performace. (2010)

This performance is a very exciting piece of art; this is very inspirational for our painting segment in our installation. The video expresses one artist paining on a huge floor canvas with use of two other painted body performances, in which are also used to be painted on by the main artist. What inspires me about this piece is that, all of the audience members are sat there watching for the whole period of the performance and throughout the performance they respond to what is happening. The audience are thoroughly enjoy it, as they all gasp and make genuine sounds to employ that they are enjoying it.

In our performance, as we are not only painting the canvas in correlation to our mood, we have been thinking about painting ourselves and each other. (Myself and Chelsey). Also for the Body installation piece we have been discussing about having Abbie and Rosie stood in front of two mirrors commenting on what they don’t like about their bodies onto the mirror in lipstick, and maybe then invites the audience to perhaps rub off the comment and state something nice about their body. This will not only change the performer’s mood but also the audience members too.

For the music part of our piece we have also had the idea that Alex would be in charge of the music and then expressing how she feels through dancing.

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The Introduction to ‘Experiential’

The introduction to the performance was something that needed a great deal of thought, mainly because we do not want anyone to feel like they are being made to do something they did not want to do. We want to see if an audience member can become a performer without them knowing.

Therefore the end product for the introduction was, as follows:

Slide One:

Experiential

drama18

Welcome to our performance. Please feel free to come inside and explore.

Slide Two: 

What Is It?

Experiential will influence you to think about cause and effect in relation to your mood. There will be paint, smashing of crockery, music and aspects of live performance. Find out how you respond? Experience something you have probably never had to opportunity to experience.

Slide Three:

What Do You Do?

We would like to you to come into the room with an open mind. Don’t be afraid to do what your instincts tell you to do.

We need your response. We need your involvement. We need you to do what you want.

Slide Four:

Mood

How are you feeling today? Stressed? Angry? Happy? Sad? Crazy?

Can we change your mood? By encouraging you to do the simplest of tasks?

 What is the cause and effect of mood?

Slide Five:

Enjoy

Most of all…

We want you to go through the doors, enter the space, forget any inhibitions you may have and simply just enjoy yourself.

This PowerPoint is going to be printed out and stuck to the doors going into the space, so the audience we encouraged to read it before entering the room which held our performance.

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The Artist is Present


This video is Marina Abramovic’s ‘The Artist Present’
For our installation I thought this would be a good piece to take inspiration from.
The idea would be to push me as a performer: having a chair sat next to me so the audience are able to sit with me if they wish, but i am not allowed to talk or get up. I must just sit there.

This will definitely push me as a performer with my focus and concentration.
With the installation being about the mood I believe that as time goes on my mood will definitely be affected.

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Live performance and cause/effect of our mood.

 

Whilst the five main aspects of our installation are taking place, our own group performance will be a range of material that we have incorporated to see the affect of our own personal mood and not the audience.

A few ideas we have thought about are:

-Sitting for an hour with no communication.

-Exercising for an hour. Not stopping once.

-Doing a Jigsaw puzzle.

– Reading the same page over and over again.

– Staring and a clock for an hour, saying aloud the time every minute.

– Saying aloud the alphabet for an hour over and over again.

– Applying make-up and removing it.

These tasks will all have a huge effect on the human body physically and mentally. If we fail to finish our own set task, we decided that it might be good idea to swap tasks with a different member of the group and to see if their body can cope with the situation better than the last member. This will evidently show how different exercises can affect the moods of different individuals and how their body can cope with different tasks.

Similarly to the Ambravoic Method, ‘The method exposes the mind-set of the performer to the public and involves a series of exercises and environments’ (2013) http://www.marinaabramovicinstitute.org/mission/the-abramovic-method

Our piece is all about the mind set of the audience and what mood they are feeling. This method is similar to ours as our piece also involves a series of exercises that the audience members need to participate in to get the appropriate outcome.

The questions that come to mind when preparing our installation:

Why are they in that specific mood?

How can we change their mood?

Do our exercises have the same response for all of our audience members?

What would change my mood?

There are many questions that come to mind when preparing this installation, seeing as though we cannot pre run this experiment as we want the final piece to be THE experiment.

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Marina Abramovic and Rhythm 0

‘Marina Abramovic told her audience that she would be the passive attendee of the performance, and would allow them to be the force upon her. She had placed 72 objects upon a table and let them use the objects on her in any way they chose for the period of 6 hours. Among the objects were a feather, a rose, honey, scissors, a whip, a scalpel, a gun and a single bullet to fit the gun’ (Veritas, 2013).

marina 1

This image shows the 72 different objects that were laid out for audience members to choose from and use upon Marina in anyway they wished.

marina 3

This image shows different times within the performance where audience member’s were manipulating Marina’s body.

marina 2

Finally, here is an image of Marina at the end of the performance. In Veritas’s post about the rhythm 0 performance, they state how Marina said:

‘What I learned was that if you leave it up to the audience, they can kill you. I felt really violated – they cut up my clothes, stuck rose thorns in my stomach, one person aimed the gun at my head, and another took it away. It created an aggressive atmosphere. After exactly 6 hours, as planned, I stood up and started walking toward the audience. Everyone ran away, to escape an actual confrontation’ (2013).

Even though our ideas about our performance are not to the extremes of that shown by Marina, however, the performance is an inspiration for our final piece. This is due to us wanting to leave the audience members to do what they like with the materials which have been provided for them within the given space. In a sense we are leaving them to their own devices to play around and interpret things within their own way. We do not want to manipulate or influence the way in which audience members respond to the different stations so we agreed it would be best to leave them to their own devices. Some audience members may be more interactive with the space than other members but that isn’t a problem, for all audience members are different and will respond to different things in various ways.

In one of the stations titled Colour explosion, we will be leaving a blank canvas with pots of paints, sponges, paint brushed and mixing pallets for the audience members to express themselves in anyway they feel necessary. The end result will be interesting to see the variation in colour and images created.

Work Cited :

Veritas, Vincent Omnia (2013) Marina Abramovic After Performing Rhythm 0 + two Videos, Online: http://www.bestgore.com/sexual-disaster/marina-abramovic-rhythm-0-videos/ (Accessed April 30th 2013).

Posted in Chelsey Ellen Glover, Multimedia, Performance, Research | Leave a comment