Performance by Design
The objective is to cultivate student-created performances, both individually and collaboratively, and to explore strategies for advancing the collective work. This course imposes no restrictions on the scope of work. The class is designed to support theatre designers in their creative and technical development while providing a space for experimentation and collaboration. It aims to build confidence, expand knowledge, and foster a sense of community among students.
The course primarily focuses on design and aesthetics. However, it encourages designers to engage with performance elements to better understand how design influences and interacts with live performance.
Solo Performance
For my first solo performance, after having learned about Paul McCarthy and his level of uncomfortability within his performance art pieces, I knew I wanted to explore a defenseless state within my own work. I wanted to curate a space that felt almost as if the audience was intruding into a private moment of vulnerability. My main theme at hand dealt with the ongoing masking that may occur in an artist’s journey. Putting on a mask as a defense mechanism against anyone who may doubt your abilities. There comes a time when masking can no longer keep you sane, having to carry such frustations in you, build up and an explosion of fear comes with it. The feeling of suffocating behind such high expectations you have created for yourself, only way out it to take that mask off, take all of it off.
This was the first time I ever incorporated makeup into my design, so it was quite a heartwarming experience being able to bring two things I love most together to create a heavy piece. There were two masks, one made out of cardboard paper, painted on with acrylic paint and then there is the skin like mask which mimicked that of the first mask. Through this feeling of suffocation, I took off the first mask, unveiling the second mask. Feeling that yearning sensation to escape, I rip off my face. I peel the second mask off, pearls hitting the ground, heavy breathing as Thom Yorke’s “Unmade Overtones” piano synthesizers increase my plea to be free.
I purposefully placed the audience in a thrust seating space as close as possible in order to create discomfort in the audience, but also I knew having people so close to me in my vulnerable state would impact the severity and emotional heaviness of my performance.
First Attempt at Skin Peeling
My first try at peeling my skin (rehearsing the sequence), it was a far more impulsive angry direction as opposed to the final performance piece I curated. I was moved by the idea of overconsumption of media as an artist. Not knowing my genuine artistic style because of the many influences around me. Who I was, who I want to be. All these overwhelming questions gave for a more violent acceptance of the harsh truth; I was wearing a mask.
Many design choices changed, I completely changed the makeup design, adding more texture to the skin and the pearls. My theme took a drastic turn as I embraced more of a helpless suffocating artist experience as oppose to that of an angry ambitious artist.
This video serves a visual example for how the peeling took place during the performance piece. make all the difference.
Duo Performance
Continuing the study of collaboration, Veronica (scene partner) and I began to look back at our retrospective work. Our goal was to make a piece about the process of developing your own artistic style and the fluidity that comes with creating art with others. Seeing the way both artists’ work is apparent through bends and distinct shapes. We took a small room and made it our playing space. How do we take both of our auras and merge them into one big energywave? Going into this performance piece, I knew I wanted to incorporate nature, as an artist it grounds me to know that despite all our different journeys we all came from the same earth, breathing the same air, stepping on the same soil.
I used different textures for opposite sides of the space to suggest our different styles and approach to art. Projection of time cycling throughout the growth of the earth around us, paired with Thom Yorke’s “The Big City”. Shortly after, we come together to collaborate in a movement piece with a transparent fabric which subsequently covered with our paint, our work. We have two different paint colors: blue and red, coming together to make purple. Veronica and Evelyn coming together to make art.
Projection Video
Group Performance
Our goal was to present our unique process of creating art through collaboration. Do you listen to music or a podcast while you are rendering? Or do you watch a tv series simultaneously? We worked together to create a big canvas out of the floors and walls of the Scenic Lab and used mixed media to enhance the white walls. To incorporate everyone’s process we decided to play music that we listen to while working. Yoder informed us that in the sound design program, they have an exercise in which one begins a project and then it is passed along for others to add onto. We wanted to mimic that feeling of collaboration while allowing ourselves to accept the circumstance in which we were in: entangled by yarn rope. In order for one person to move across and paint a wall, the other had to allow them grace and stretch their limbs for the rope to reach the other side. Embracing the many directions collaboration took us towards.