Weekly report 2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NG0a7AsP08g

Sarah: Behind the Mask

27.7.18

I feel that our third week in the studio had gone well and we have spent some productive time experimenting and unpacking our findings. We are beginning to get more of a sense of each other in terms of who we are as performers and what it is that we want to bring to the final piece. We have been pushing and testing each other by creating a safe environment to explore our emotions and feelings regarding our themes and lines of enquiry. We are trying to establish the point that feels comfortable for us to engage with the themes but without drawing on too many personal experiences that would possibly end up being detrimental to the work produced.

Last week’s questions

The questions that we had at the end of last week are below with some initial answers that we have formed this week.

1. How can we subvert the work to say something more than what is on the surface?

To subvert our work, we will need to at times find the humour within it – the more ‘anxty’ and ‘feel sorry for me’ it is the more ‘GCSE Drama’ it becomes. We have started to find interesting work within our movement piece and we are able to subvert this by finding humour and beauty within it.

1. How can I break form and perform with less ‘beauty’?

This question again is related to the movement piece we created. Sonia physically trying to stop me from moving made me less ‘beautiful’ in my movements. However, there was still beauty within the piece and so going forward we will be experimenting with the same piece but Sonia stopping me in different ways and with different emotions attached to her intention.

1. How can Sonia break her form? Why does she want to be hidden?

I believe Sonia wants to be hidden because the darkness becomes her comfort blanket. She feels free to speak and give opinion when she is hidden from view more so that when she is face to face with a person/audience. Sonia loves to write lengthy emails and texts – another way to be hidden but still being able to say what it is she wants to say. We have used some of this week’s experiments to address this and try to break form.

1. How can we use masks to explore our themes?

We used masks in one of our studio experiments referenced below. This was an initial starting point which we will be exploring further – we were cutting up the masks to create ‘beauty’ – the notion of cutting is something that interested us and we wish to extend into other parts of and possibly even the whole piece.

1. How can we add humour to our performance work?

I think that after this week’s work humour is something that will come naturally for both of us in different ways –it shouldn’t be forced. As Sam and Jo observed some of the things we both say have humour in them just because of what we are saying or questioning.

This week’s experiments

This week we focused more on the stimulus material ‘Gravity’and created new experiments around that song as well as looking at how to break form for Sonia.

• I gave Sonia two minutes to speak about various topics without apology, pause or hesitation. The topics were:

1 – Immigration

2 – The first day of the MA course

3 – The worst type of people

4 – All the worries she had had since waking up that day.

After this we spoke about how it made her feel and if she would be able to do the same with a live audience giving her the topics to discuss – this would oppose her inherent need to hide.

• I was then put in a similar situation – out of my comfort zone. Sonia gave me words to put into a rap on the spot – we knew this wouldn’t sound ‘nice’ it would not be prepared and polished. We then considered again if I could do this in front of an audience and have them give me the words – this experiment was designed to look at completely breaking our form and comfort zones.

• We revisited the movement piece with Sonia wrapping me up in masking tape to stop me moving and dancing. We discussed different ways we could use the tape and if there were other ways to stop the movements.

• We performed the movement piece in our second studio session for Jo and Sam. Before we did this, we marked specific moments in the piece that we wanted to choreograph in a specific way - this was to try and reproduce moments from the first improvised performance.

• We then moved on to our experiment with the masks. We had images of many famous women – they were taken from lists of the world’s most beautiful women and the world’s most influential women. We then had 5 minutes to cut and the parts from the faces that we thought were most beautiful and then created our own face from them which I stuck on Sonia and she stuck on me. We also wrote down other elements we thought created beauty such as height, shoe size, weight etc.

Observations

The main points of observation we pulled from our experiments were:

1. We both have very different insecurities inside us that come out in different situation.

2. My obsession with image and beauty occupies my mind as much as Sonia’s social anxieties and worries about judgement.

3. If we try to choreograph too much we lose the intention and the impulsive nature of the work.

4. By choreographing work, we are ultimately reverting back to our need for perfection, with no room for flaws. Obviously in the final piece we will need to have a polished and rehearsed piece but leaving some moments to chance and impulse will, perhaps, add more gravity to the piece.

5. Cutting – this is possibly something that we wish to use as a through-line or reoccurring theme throughout the piece.

6. When using masks, we need to ensure we are referencing more than just physical beauty. If we only wish to focus on this area other classifications such as race and sexuality will need to be referenced, even if only to say – this is not what this is about.

7. We both have many contradictions within us and we would like to bring these out and explore them in our final piece.

Subversion and Questions

Were we able to subvert the work that we produced this week?

I feel as though we were more successful with the movement piece. We were not sending it up (Vicar of Dibley style). We let the movements and restriction of movement take the piece where it needed to go. We will continue with this.

The Mask experiment was the first in what I imagine to be a series of experiments such as this. Currently the work produced is at surface level and we will need further investigation before we are able to fully access what we want to say through this means of exploration.

The questions we have going forward from here are:

1. How can we subvert the work to say something more than what is on the surface?

2. How can we use the concept and notion of CUTTING as a reoccurring theme and through-line?

3. How can we use more push and pull in our movement work?

4. What are our own contradictions that we can include in the work?

Further Experiments & Ideas

• Downfall of women – Peaches Geldof, Paula Yates, Whitney Houston.

• Being held down with physical weight – sand bags, laundry, detergent etc.

• Cutting up magazine article from a woman’s magazine and creating something new from this.

• More mask work

---

BEHIND SONIA: breaking the mirror

The experimenting continues:

Following from last week’s experiments we continued our explorations in breaking each other’s form while getting to know the other person better. Since that last week we focused more on Sarah, this week, we focused more on me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-ow_Yrv1mM

Starting by Sarah’s questions of how could she break my form and why do I insist on hiding myself, I decided to ask her opinion before answering them. It turns out I didn’t have to. Sarah saw right through me and it was… terrifying! I felt very exposed but it was a good thing because after that I thought the only way was forward. And that way we went! Sarah asked me to give my opinion on four topics and gave me two minutes per subject.

1. What is your opinion on immigrants?

2. Describe what was on your mind/your feeling on the first day you started this course.

3. In your opinion what is the worst and the best kind of people?

4. Tell me all the thoughts you had today since you woke up.

What I felt during those eight minutes was a lot of discomfort and an even bigger effort not to lose track of my thoughts while constructing my argument. Doing that in front of Sarah was not that bad because I know her. She mentioned it could be productive to do the same exercise with a group of strange and known people… I’m looking forward to it, as long as I don’t know the day!

I think it was important to allow Sarah to test me as it was important to me to ask her to do Karaoke and rap. We have a lot of information that we are not going to use but it is important for us to know more about each other (and consequently ourselves) and what we discover always influence our work.

Breaking and Improvising:

1 We decided to continue exploring the improvised exercise we did last week. What started as a way to try to break Sarah’s graceful way of dancing, progressed into an attempt to show a woman trying to be graceful and beautiful while facing her own ideas of self-criticism, beauty, perfection and anxiety. Despite those feelings being too self-destructive, there’s also an idea of comfort in them… We were playing around with these concepts and trying to find a way to show this love-hate for oneself in a physical way and to do so we kept some movements from the initial exercise, and use a Barbie mask and physical movements for the criticism, holding and cellar tape to show imprisoning but also comfort. We decided that even if we don’t use this in our final piece, there are definitely parts of it that we want to continue exploring.

2 We were talking about masks since last week. We agreed on doing an improvised exercise where we cut different parts of masks of women we considered to be beautiful in order to create the “perfectly beautiful” woman. After the exercise I realised that for Sarah that meant how she would like to look like while for me it was just someone healthy and without precise measurements. There are things in the way I look that I’d like to change but I wouldn’t like to be like Angelina Jolie (“Why not?” asked Sarah in shock), because in my opinion that would be too exhausting and I like the possibility of looking good when I get all dressed up for special occasions either than the “imposition” of having to look good all the time. The maintenance would be exhausting!

Reflections

- Talking about my social anxiety is not such a big issue as exposing my personal opinions is. Why? I know what I want to say but the possibility of pointing out the flaws in my arguments makes me try to calculate every possible scenario and therefore I get caught up in my own expiral of non-stopping hypothesis.

- After listening and observing Sarah I realised that I can compare the feeling above to what she thinks when she feels people are judging the way she looks. I’m afraid people noticing that I lost my line of thought as much as Sarah is terrified that they notice she has one nail broken. We are both full of contradictions. That makes us unique and therefore using those contradictions in a preformative way will make the final piece more truthful and honest.

Questions that emerged after the supervision

- What lies behind me wanting to stop Sarah?

- Do we all want to be something we’re not?

- Why do women want to be smaller?

- Why is there comfort in looking at beautiful women looking not perfect?

- Sonia if you find a woman beautiful, why don’t you want to look like her?

For next week

- We want to continue exploring how to use the masks and maybe add other body parts.

- We would like to do the mask exercise again but focused on smart/influential women and then compare with the one about beauty.

- I'm thinking about different ways how to incorporate social anxiety and depression in what we are creating, but without forcing it. I would like to play with my original ideas of combining recorded voice and darkness but also by trying to find humour in it.

- Continuing exploring this idea of "cutting" by deconstructing and comparing definitions of beauty according to magazines and the dictionary.