3rd CCW Salon

What’s my purpose of outside exhibition?

These two days I took part in CCW 3rd Salon showing a video installation, i thinker. This time the form of presenting is slightly different from interim show, which is presenting three videos in small scale screens in a box, and view through a hole.

What’s my aim of this exhibition?

1, Present my work to different audience.

2, Get feedback from people from different blackground.

3, See other students’ work.

During the Salon, I chatted to some audience who from others colleges in order to get feedback. Totally different perspectives and feedback are got from the people I chatted with. Although only few discussion are related to my research area, I found it is very interested getting various perspectives, which would help in my next work.

Way of seeing & visual effect

Different scales of image could dominate audiences’ gaze in different level. Like this exhibition, way of presenting my videos in small scale, making audience viewing images through a hole, which give audience another feeling, a private view. And here it connected to the gaze, the pleasure of gazing at people’s bodies as objects and voyeurism . Mulvey, in Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975), describes how gazing at a screen does two things. It involves the voyeuristic process of objectification and the narcissistic process of identification with an ‘ideal ego’.

After this exhibition, also because I am going to put on a performance in Jun, there are questions for me. What’s the aim for presenting a show outside? Getting different audience? What do I expect getting from them?

supermarket Shakespeare

Supermarket Shakespeare – 05 may 2010

Supermarket Shakespeare is a play, based on a story by Shakespeare, which performed in a non-theatre space, a Sainsbury’s supermarket during normal open hours. The play, 20 minutes long, was repeated three times, so audience members could watch it again, but following a different character.

The play begins with the six characters, wearing everyday clothes or a supermarket uniform, who work or shop in the supermarket, starting in different places in the supermarket, and audience members choose which character to follow as each character walks around the supermarket according to their own storyline. The opening part of each storyline seems independent, but during the play different characters meet in the supermarket and the storylines interlink.

At the beginning of each story line, performers would build up a relationship between audience and character, so that the audience automatically became one part of the play. For example, an actor talked to the audience like they were old friends, or like they were supermarket trainees. The actor then took the audience on the storyline as they walked around the supermarket. The audience members, including ones who didn’t come for the show but for shopping, became involved by answering questions from the character, joining in conversations and sharing the happiness and sadness of the character’s situation. For example, one audience member hugged a character when she was crying.

This type of interactive performance, involving the audience directly in conversation with the character, leads to questions about the role of the audience. For example, how far should an audience member respond to the acting? Should audiences respond to all the questions from actors? The audience is asked to take on a role, e.g. a trainee, so, how much should they act that role during the performance? As an audience member, I personally experienced such questions and looked for ways to find answers.

It seems important whether or not the audience know that a performance will be interactive before they decide to attend this performance. Because it affects how much they want to join the performance. Supermarket Shakespeare did not say there would be audience involvement, This might limit interaction of audience with the actors and also would make audience self-conscious which affected their relationship with the play. It seems that if the audience know interaction is part of the performance, then they can be more freely because everyone knows the situation is not just about the performers, but also about the interaction.

Also, there are some questions relating to performance that should be considered: How to control situations, like the over-interactive and non-interactive audience members, during the performance? How much response should be expected from audiences? This supermarket play, for instance. What is actor’s position when audiences over-respond to the acting? How to deal with a situation that an actor has not audience follower – should the acting be continued without an audience?

There are no certain answers to these and similar questions, but undoubtedly the actor/performer does have different responsibilities compared to a traditional performance in which the audience is totally separate from the performance. The performer, as a character, must work with the audience-performers in way that the performer thinks is correct.

This is one interesting aspect of the effect of interactive performance on the role of the spectator. Of course, it means that every performance is different, and chance is now part of the performance, but also means the director’s control is more reduced. This is because the performer makes important decisions about the final performance, for example, how much to let the audience perform, and the director does not control this.

Digital double

In digital performance, take digital double for instance, Steve Dixon (2008) suggests that performing with live video projection, two performers, physical and digital, explores the relationship between their real and digital, body and mind. The live performer and her digital double reflect and copy one another. Also, the digital double is a self-reflection that could effect its live double as well.

And here the use of screens in performance seems to echo Lacan's mirror stage because they can be used to separate a virtual, or abstract, world from the real world of the performance. For example, when a screen shows a body double of the performer, is the world on the screen similar in role to the reflection in the mirror? Also, it seems that the reflection in the mirror is in some way imaginary, that the understanding of the reflection by the subject is connected to subjective and internal thought processes. This seems similar to the use of projections to communicate performer's inner states to the audience.

In my last piece, iThnker, a video installation, I focus on exploring the relationship between projection and onstage acting. In particular, I am looking at the usage of a ‘digital double’, how this double works with reflection with the real body, and showing inner states, dreams and fantasies.

From Descartes, Mind and Body Spilt, our body contains our mind, however our mind might be limited by our body and self. In digital performance, in one way, video projection seems could free the Mind, separate it from the body, and present it in visual ways, showing the abstract worlds of dream and conscious fantasy.

Here, this idea has a connection to Lacan’s ideas about the mirror stage and how we form ourselves, our self-identity. In addition, Dixon suggests that dreams and fantasies, unconscious and conscious, may be seen as a reflection of human beings' true self’.

This seems the usage of screens showing images of dreams or fantasies of character, in some level, could fully present a character.