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: