Final Performance

We’ve just finished our final performance of ‘Thirty’ on the 17th of May 2012.

I personally feel very drained, which is ironic given the fact that we have just consumed copious amounts of water. I think ultimately we might have underestimated the task which we devised. In theory, eating eighteen slices of pizza seemed manageable, appealing even; and blowing 30 balloons seems like a walk in the park. However during the piece tonight it became clear that we had not anticipated how challenging this task would be. Thirty became a test of our stamina as performers.

In the post show discussion it was agreed that the rhythm of our piece changed as the time elapsed. What started off as a cool, calm collected ritual, then turned in to a manic dash towards the end of the time.  This was something we could not have anticipated, due to the fact that it couldn’t be rehearsed. Granted, we have held a couple of work in progress’, however we ultimately found that during those we rushed our task at the start. This left too much time at the end with very little happening. This probably prompted our relaxed approach at the start of the final piece.

It became clear that we would not be able to finish all of the tasks that we had set individually, therefore we began to help each other out. This added to the frantic end, with people taking on tasks that were not previously assigned to them. We were all working together to help each other complete the task. This was unspoken, we had used our word allowance within one of the tasks, therefore we had to communicate with just our bodies.
For example, there was one instance when Kirsty was struggling to drink her Carlsberg. She passed the glass to me (Admittedly I was rather confused) but then she tapped it to indicate that she was struggling. I then helped out by trying to drink some for her. Similarly other performers did this, Sammi finished the rest of Kirsty’s beer.  Gemma took pieces of Marc’s pizza, and Marc drank more water than he should have done. We worked as a team to complete as much as we humanly could.

In the post show discussion, Lee mentioned a performance entitled ‘As the World Tipped’.
Having viewed a clip, it becomes clear that the piece also deals with the presentation of statistics. The piece is on a much larger scale than ours, please find a clip below.

In hindsight I think this would have been good for our research, however it may have prompted us to over complicate our piece. What I think worked best about our piece was how simple it was. Yes, there were alot of tasks for us to perform, however ultimately it was on quite a small scale. The statistics that we dealt with were so large that they sometimes become difficult to comprehend, therefore we kept the piece on a small scale, magnifying much larger events.