Saturday, February 3, 2007

Performance and article #1: Mother

This is my response to a performance and an article I viewed and read through the Body, Space, and Technology Journal. The performance was very interesting to me, perhaps because of my own experiences as a participant in a perhaps less than ideal mother-daughter relationship. The article was particularly interesting in that it was mainly about the ways content was generated for performance, an idea that we have talked a lot about in class. I will view the rest of the Mother performance series and post my response to it in the near future.

Performance:

Mother 1 http://people.brunel.ac.uk/bst/vol06/home.html

Some of the difficulties I imagine in producing the performance of Mother 1 would be: the coordination of the screen imagine and the live actress’s spoken word and the coordination of the live lighting effects and the screen changes. These problems probably fall under the category of “time-lag,” which we discussed in the first week of class. In terms of the content, what was most interesting to me was the use of color in both the live and the screen aspects of the performance, and the manner in which these were enhanced by the lighting. The use of greens and blues throughout, and the presence of the green ribbon across the stage seemed to indicate a jungle or forest, until later the actress referred to it as the garden. This use of color made the climax, where the child character was being smothered with the white fabric, all the more striking.

Article:

http://www.lustyjuventus.co.uk/M_Other_project.html on the M(Other) Project

This article is largely concerned with the content-generating process of the Mother multi-media performance in the above paragraph. The piece was an equal collaboration among a writer, a performer particularly interested in physicalization of character, a director, and the artist responsible for the video. The most interesting part of the article for me was the discussion by the actor of somatic practice and the ability to communicate through the body. She discusses developing a kinesthetic awareness of the body that can lead to authenticity of movement, the purpose of which is to better and more honestly communicate with an audience. While I am very interested in movement as part of a performance, I found the limited use of movement in the video to be surprising, given this artist’s clear devotion to movement in performance. However, it must also be noted that the most movement in the performance occurs at the climax, and it is certainly effective. Perhaps the limited movement in the early parts of the piece was designed on purpose-indeed I had not noticed how limited it was until I read this artist’s contribution to the article.

No comments: