This week we had a very surreal sort of experience in our session.
‘Words, words, words’ said Donald (and Hamlet), ‘I want you to think about words’. The idea being that they didn’t have to make sense. Donald wanted us to understand that whatever we perform for our final solo performance it could end up being art for art’s sake. Or Gibberish, as I prefer to call it.
We each came up with a setting, a short sequence of lights and sound to create a mood for the beginning of a piece. It could be anything we like. We also had to introduce a human being doing something.
So, I came up with the following;
A dark space. Dry ice or smoke rolls across the space as a tight white spotlight comes on from directly above R. and goes out as ‘Aerodynamic’ by Daft Punk begins to play loudly.
Another tight white spotlight comes on from directly above L. and goes out after three seconds.
A third tight white spotlight comes on from directly above C. and goes out.
The three spotlights flash intermittently and then cease after fifteen seconds. The music fades down to a more acceptable level as a General Wash fades up dimly to reveal a horseshoe shaped wall with three doors along it’s length. The music continues as a woman bursts through the centre door wearing a straight jacket which she is tied into. She has an itch on her nose.
We were then asked to hand what we’d written to the person next to us and let them continue the sequence. I handed mine over to David Halliday and he continued with the following;
She attempts to scratch her nose on her sleeves calmly. A slow beat starts.
The spotlights from before come up one at a time and in time with the beats. The beats speed up and the spotlights keep pace as her attempts get more desperate.
As the tempo increases the colour of the spotlights change. This continues for a minute.
The woman screams as the lights and sound snap out.
In the darkness there is a sniffing of the woman’s nose. This combines with the sound of water dripping.
We now were handed back our pieces of work and told to add text to it. This could be anything we wanted. A recipie, a speech, dialogue, a poem, a dictionary. So I chose to write;
The poem ‘If’ by Rudyard Kipling is delivered calmly by a male voice in the darkness.
This all seems nonsensical, and believe me, other people’s work was far more absurd than this. However, this simple exercise got the point across to the class that whatever we wanted to do, we could do it. Certainly food for thought.
Solo performance, or indeed any performance, doesn’t have to make sense. It can be art for art’s sake.