Here is my final Vlog entry plus some photographs of the set on the morning of performance.
Vlog 2 – More Fuschia!
////Vlog 1 – Calm (ish) Before The Storm
//Market Research
//In order to both advertise and generate interest in my performance I conducted some research into the content I was including. I was curious to find out other opinions on this; when do the public feel England celebrated it’s greatest days, when did this vision of Arcadia exist? I spoke to over 100 people in the Lincoln area to find out when in history they indicated. After speaking to members of the public across the city, I share my results below:
Reading clockwise from “12 o’clock”
Blue: Today
Red: 1990s
Green: 1980s
Purple: 1960s
Blue: 1940s
Orange: Winning World War 1 & 2
Blue: Before the Wars
Pink: Elizabethan Times
Green: At the Peak of the Empire
Purple: Never
You can see from this that, in the research sample, the most popular findings were the 1980s, 1960s and that this idyllic vision of England has never existed. Some of these participants were also recorded so that I may share this process within the performance itself. These two popular decades feature in the performance. What was interesting was the answers I had not anticipated, such as the period when England’s empire was vast. This leads me to believe that my performance has the potential to expand from the 10 minute project, in which I examine only five different time periods. Consider also that this was data received from just over 100 people in Lincoln. If I conducted the same research in different cities I may get entirely different answers that Lincoln’s public.
Response to Feedback – Time to Carnival!
//After conducting a work in progress showing of my solo performance, the most communicated feedback concerned my clarity of expression of the performance. This was said in regard to using the “shoe-queue” idea to journey back in time, which at some points became hard for the audience to distinguish which sections of the performance related to which period. A suggestion was to use clearer visual aids to make each change distinct from the last. After a weekend of testing out ideas and brainstorming, I began to work on a new staging concept. This took the form of a sort of “evolution of man”/ comic strip hybrid. I have drawn images of 1980s/60s/Wartime/Elizabethan/caveman figures, stood in a line resembling the famous evolution of man timeline image. This drawn on a canvas I intend to stretch across the width of the studio, cutting out holes where the faces of these images would be, so I can simply place my face in the image (like a carnival cut-out) to allow for quicker transitions than previously performed.
Although not brought up in the feedback, one aspect of the performance I had difficulty in devising was the narrative itself. I had initially intended to make a story with the level of detail seen in the works of Spalding Gray (a practitioner who has influenced me greatly) in a short period of performance time. Gray uses minimalistic staging in his performances, often just a table, chair and glass of water, but through his descriptive narratives can conjure images of foreign countries with no visual aid for the audience. Since I struggled to write anything with as much detail for a ten minute performance, this new idea of momentarily adopting the qualities of the characters on this timeline means that the need for description in this piece is reduced, and enables me to present a more physical approach in the performance. This means that I am able to keep similar performance elements to Gray, as he also switches temporarily between the characters in his story, but also include performance styles more familiar to myself like Steven Berkoff’s importance of physicality.
The video montage below is a collection of photographs taken during this drawing workshop:
The Aesthetic
//The last blog post identifies the key concept I wish to express through my piece, until now however I haven’t figured out how exactly to best portray this examination of Arcadia over time. Last week I discovered a photograph that had gone viral over the internet:
This photograph, known as the ‘Shoe Queue’ was taken in Thailand last August. The customers use their shoes to indicate there position in the line while the staff are on their lunch breaks, and then take a seat nearby until it is there turn to be served. From this I thought, ‘what is more inherently English than standing in queues?’, and my concept seemed to fit into this image. What if each pair of shoes belonged to Englishmen across time and everyone was waiting in line together to locate the images of Arcadia forged in art. The piece would begin with my character joining the rear, with someone in the 1980s ahead in the queue.
This allows for the today character, who idolises the eighties as an era where British arts thrived, to inquire about how people of today consider Arcadia to be the 80s. However ahead of the 80s pair of shoes in the queue is someone from the 50s who the former believes to have lived in the idyllic England. The queue continues with World War 1 military boots, pre-war shoes, Elizabethan shoes and eventually cave-man shoes. Indicating how each moment of our past have we identified a more appealing period of history we have nostalgia for until we reach a time when England never existed.
Between each time period/ pair of shoes, I will thread in pieces of poetry, literature and/or song, linking the two. This allows me to return to the research I conducted on Pete Doherty, as his poetry describes the England lost somewhere in time. For instance his poem “Chalky Dean” reads:
‘A cup of tea, Chalky Dean
To ease your misery
Your war, your family
Your new flat in Kilburn – been
There since 73,
Since 83, on your own
The England designed by you
Can’t be found,
And you feel so much on your own
The England life gave to you,
Is long gone away,
And you have never felt so ready
To leave and look for it.
So out you go.’
Or for instance in the video below in which Doherty offers his perspective on the absence of great in Great Britain: