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Final Performance – Kirsty

Our final performance of ‘Thirty’ was yesterday (17th May 2012) to a sold out audience in Studio 2 of the LPAC.

All I can start by saying is that I feel we definitely underestimated the task at hand. On previous runs of the task, we had never fully run the whole 30minutes with all of the tasks involved. The most we had test run before was 15minutes and we definitely and unfortunately felt the negative effects of being so blase about being able to do double of that, “no problem!” After around 20 minutes I began to feel full from the epic amounts of water we were consuming, this was also being accompanied by a pint of Carlsberg! And there was still another 10 minutes to endure. Not to mention on top of this another performer was also consuming the same amount of water as the other performers but then also eating 18 slices of pizza. To echo one of my colleagues ” Thirty became a test of our stamina as performers” and it really did. We did not
It became clear at around 20 minutes past the hour that we may not finish our own set tasks. Therefore we had an unspoken set rule that between us we would share out the tasks we felt we would be unable to complete. This was proven true when at one stage I felt like I could not physically drink any more fluids be it water or the pint of Carlsberg. So I passed these on to Charlotte who, hates beer, but managed to drink some to assist me. Gemma ending up assisting Marc with his pizza and Sammi ended up helping blow up the balloons also. The end of the performance culminated in a manic free for all, with all performers fanatically trying to complete the set tasks in the allotted time. Afterward we discovered from some audience members that they like the frantic ending and were willing us on to finish. We even had some feedback from one audience member saying they wanted to get up and help us. We did initially discuss giving things out to the audience if it got too much, but the idea did not make it to the final stages.ultimately set out to perform an endurance task, but this is what I feel it became.

A constant throughout our rehearsal process was the argument with ourselves on how to reveal the statistics. Some times we thought we sound just tell the audience, either have them on the walls of the studio, in envelopes for the audience to read out and even written on ourselves. The idea that we finally came up with was to include them within a statistic, within the performance. The statistic about speaking (please see blog post entitled ‘Talking Words’. Link: https://mmpgrouptwo2012.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/2012/03/19/talking-words/) gave us all 90 words each to say throughout the piece.

We decided to write down all of the statistics and cut each word out, mix them up and randomly pull out words. this gave us our 90 words. We ended up speaking what sounded like gibberish. The paragraph below is the words I spoke during the performance.

Die 18 party every born gets destroyed Hermione every Dumbledore rainforest September drive every LMFAO’s 1 words married 2nd 70p a Hogwarts people harry the bar the it lost the wizardry every named wall water downloaded privet child 30 54 9 every minutes London a tower Amazon child underground illness minutes 50 27,000 students since minutes Lincoln every who student rock from times night hundred sat minutes school seconds 80,000 from couple in and cat minutes pints obesity on in  on not a dissertation minute gets every uk couple university

Unknown to the audience these were the statistics, just mixed up. In our post show discussion one of our tutors mentioned that She was able to decipher some of what we said and to relate them to the tasks we were doing. Of course, she knew what our performance was about but did not know each statistic word for word.

Overall, I worry that the audience realised that we were unable to complete the tasks and were disappointed with the performance in general. However from talking to some members of the audience, they did not necessarily realise that all tasks were supposed to be completed and were impressed in what we had accomplished. So therefore I think as a group, even with our own negative thoughts about the piece, we should be proud of what we have achieved.

Time

Time became an extremely important aspect of our piece. After all the piece took place over the space of exactly thirty minutes. Throughout the rehearsal process we began thinking of ways that we could represent time passing. The first indication of time was demonstrated was through the use of the cups. They demonstrated to us as performers that the time was elapsing, as one had to be drunk every twenty seconds. We knew that the piece was drawing to an end by the decreasing amount of water. It was interesting that we finally decided to place the cups on a circular table, this provided connotations of a clock face.

Not only did we choose to use water to demonstrate time passing, but we also placed two projections on the wall behind us, one with a digital clock, and another with an anologue clock. The digital clock remained the same throughout, however the analogue had extra clips inserted into it to demonstrate the passing of time. We asked a friend: “What can you do in thirty minutes” and his reply was as follows: “You can cook ten eggs.” This was the inspiration behind the egg boiling. It was done in order to indicate time passing.

Time governed our piece, it had to be specific. We wanted the piece to start at exactly 7pm, to provide the illusion that this was happening in real time.  Whilst we were implying that all of the statistics are happening all of the time around us, we also wanted to demonstrate that we were magnifying those which happened in the thirty minutes that we performed.

 

Work In Progress #2

A couple of weeks ago we did another work in progress, and invited people to come and give us feedback on our work so far.
This proved very beneficial to us, as we were given constructive criticism with regards to improving the piece. For example, some audience members felt that the piece needed configuring better, in the sense that we needed to re-consider where the audience were.  We experimented with placing them in different boxes that were marked out with tape on the floor. This was done in an attempt to portray our statistic pertaining to immigrants.

However having considered this, we decided that was not very practical. Therefore we reconvened in an attempt to overcome small issues such as these. We planned another work in progress to demonstrate the changes we made. Please see the video of this below.

We decided to experiment by giving one individual to complete throughout the process, as well as drinking the water.
However having done this we have now decided that we feel it is best if we all complete all of the tasks, providing a sense of unity and reinforcing the fact that these statistics apply to everyone, taking place in a thirty minute time span.

Untitled from Charlotte Haythorne on Vimeo.

Having trialled doing one task at a time, we have decided that it negates the concept that these actions apply to everyone.

Did you know?

Over the course of the last couple of weeks, we have been compiling various statistics that we can incorporate within our piece.

After watching this video, I found a number of interesting facts.

The ones that resonated with me most were: It took radio 38 years to reach a market audience of 50 million

It took television 13 years to reach a market audience of 50 million

It took the internet 4 years to reach a market audience of 50 million

It took Facebook 2 years to reach a market audience of 50 million.

It would be interesting to work out how many people that equates to in terms of how many people join/joined Facebook per minute.

Work In Progress

Over the course of the last couple of weeks, we, as a group  have been compiling a series of experiments in which we have been trying out our ideas of how to visually represent a statistic. We were asked to present a ‘Work In Progress’ to demonstrate the research and work that we have done so far. In order to be fully prepared for this, we met up as a group to try a run of this. Please note, a full video of this particular exercise is currently uploading onto the blog (At a rather glacial pace!!!) But for the time being, here are some stills from the video. We tested this for 10 minutes. Resulting in ten balloons being blown up to show ten children in the UK being born. (In the UK) We popped 75% of them to indicate the death rate. The cups in the centre of the table represent the number of children who die from drinking contaminated water, which equates to one in every 20 seconds. This is an extension of a previous exercise in which we solely concentrated on drinking the water, whereas in the final piece we anticipate to be doing more tasks: Please see the video below.

The feedback received from our Work In Progress presentation has left us asking a number of questions, regarding whether to inform the audience of what they are viewing, ultimately telling them what all of our actions represent. Some thought it would be best to state this at the beginning of the performance, so that what we are doing has more of an impact throughout the piece. We have debated leaving envelopes on the seats of the audience, asking them to read out the statistic after a certain amount of time has elapsed. Furthermore we have also discussed the possibility of placing the statistics on the walls of our performance space (Studio 2) so that the audience perhaps can make the correlation between the statistics on the wall, and the actions we are performing.

We have also discussed leaving the revelation of the facts until the end of the piece. Yesterday within our presentation, this provided a sense of shock, as it took a moment for the audience members to comprehend what first appears as a monotonous series of events, such as a balloon being blown up, or a glass of water being drunk.

However it might be argued, that if we proclaim our facts at the very end, it would almost make the piece ‘preachy’ as though we want the audience to think about how much water they waste for example. We have decided that we do not want this. We do not want to convey an argument as such within the piece, we literally intent on concentrating on the visual representation of statistics.

This is something we need to think about in the upcoming weeks.

Finally the video has decided to load on the internet. Please see the video below:

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