The State I'm In

Back home, distanced and refreshed I have been able to reflect on the past three months. I feel that my work has undergone a drastic mobilisation; from the frustrations of a year spent dipping into ideas, the last three months have not only provided a much needed focus to them but more importantly have challenged and tempted them from the safety net I had surrounded them with. I have long felt the need to break away from the Schumann/dada inspired black and white cardboard aesthetic and with the completion of the group project eleven: fifty-seven I feel that this is on the turn.

Eleven: Fifty-Seven

In retrospect there is much to be pleased with. Reading Ming’s blog, I agree with his concerns with the quality of certain aspects and understand the need to be critical at this stage but would warn against too much self-flagellation. The demands of what we aimed to produce were ambitious considering the number of creative voices and accommodating the range of disciplines. The vast array of media did not conflict and was used evenly, appropriately, and despite the varity of stylistic inputs it had a strong aesthetic coherency. I felt we succeeded in creating an expansive and tangible world in which the characters existed and in which the audience could be immersed, a world in which (according to feedback) they were more than happy to inhabit. It was one of Ming’s criticism that the audience did not behave as we had intended and I myself was shocked when the puppet figures encountered them face too face on the boulevard. Yet the audiences reaction was one of the most interesting out-comes. We had created this rich environment but had made little provision to contain the audience, instead preferring to guide and focus the action by using the various elements of media and performer. I feel that when we are able to view the recording of the performance we can get a greater sense of how these dynamics worked. I will post reflections of how my own contributions to the work developed on a future blog and much more will be commented upon in the coming weeks when the group put up an exhibition of the process in the foyer gallery space at Wimbledon.

A Critical Shift

My own research project has shifted in its approach and focus. The over-riding feedback from my Cross Course Crit was that my work, practically had moved beyond my theoretical interests. This was confirmed after a tutorial with Amanda. We spoke of how the ‘Uncanny’ was a valid but less engaging thread to my thinking, and that there was something much more dynamic at the heart of my questioning which corresponds with my over-arching argument Towards a Theatre of Objects. The Uncanny and the mythologies surrounding the doppelganger contain this questioning but it is (particularly from a fine art perspective) a bit of a cliché and a much less pertinent area of investigation to drive my work forward. I therefore have taken a different tact, which is a development of my research into the Uncanny (I will still be using the idea of the doppelganger but using it as material to inform performance rather than the focus of research). My new direction will consider what am I arguing when I talk of ‘a theatre of objects’, and what ideas are at play.

It seems that I am arguing towards a theatre of objectification. From an ethnographical standpoint, a theatre that objectifies (through the objects used) is one in which the participants (performers and audience) become ‘objects’ themselves, as in ritual performance. These ideas cross humanist and anti-humanist dialogues, asking fundamental questions of what it is to be human, (which has allowed me to grapple with some of the more challenging philosophical texts). Furthermore, as a focus, I will explore the action at the centre of this theatre: the act of transformation. I will go further to suggest that this act is inherently violent, an exchange that is much more dynamic than it may first appear. This may seem slightly cryptic at this stage, I myself am trying to unravel the ideas and I feel uncomfortable leaving behind the relative safety of pursuing the uncanny…but I guess this is what research is all about.