Practitioners – Danny Ridealgh Solo Performance

Response to Feedback – Time to Carnival!

Daniel Ridealgh / April 29, 2014May 23, 2014 / Devising Process, Practitioners

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:

Whoopi Goldberg – Fontaine . . . Why Am I Straight?

Daniel Ridealgh / February 7, 2014February 7, 2014 / Practitioners

Before Whoopi Goldberg became the film star she is now known as, in the 1980s she created a solo performance about an ex-junkie named Fontaine. Fontaine is a reoccurring character that features in Goldberg’s work, though the content of each performance changes in accordance with the social context at the time. For instance when Goldberg revived a tour of Fontaine in the 2000s she was talking about 9/11 and the war in Iraq & Afghanistan. Goldberg has the ability to manipulate the contextual circumstances and public “views on George W Bush, religion and the management of ageing female bodies feel very much like Goldberg’s own” (Benedictus, 2013). By choosing to satirise moments of the war, not through the medium of conventional stand-up comedy, but through the creation of a former drug user amplifies the messages Goldberg intends for the audience. Yes it may add to the hilarity of Goldberg’s performance, yet “It allows her to take a simplistic view of global politics, basically for the fun of it, and to show up some of the starker absurdities of the war in Iraq” (Benedictus, 2013).

What I found most encouraging from researching Goldberg’s performance is the manner in which she wanted the audience to reflect on what they had seen. Goldberg says; “My work requires the active participation of an audience. They can’t just come and sit. How can you change people if they just sit there? If you’re right in their faces . . . they go out of the theatre saying more than just, ‘Oh, we went to a show’” (2000, p. 210). This is likely the most important philosophy I have found from researching Goldberg, how can you leave a lasting impression on an audience post-performance? When I begin to devise my work, I will certainly keep this idea at the forefront of my process.

Works Cited

Benedictus, Leo (2013) ‘Comedy Gold – Whoopi Goldberg’, The Guardian, 10^th May.

Zollo, Fred (2000) ‘Whoopi Goldberg’ In J. Bonney ed. (2000) Extreme Exposure: An Anthology of Solo Performance Texts From the Twentieth Century, New York: Theatre Communications Group.