Talking Words

‘ We speak almost 5,000 words a day’

A day has 24 hours within it.
24 hours has 1440 minutes.
5,000 words divided by 1440 minutes gives us 3.47 words spoken per minute. For the purpose of the performance we will round this down to 3 words.
Our performance is 30 minutes long.
30 minutes multiplied by 3 words gives us 90.

90 Words within our performance can be spoken by each of us.

One way of us presenting this could be for each of us in turn to read 90 random words out of a dictionary.

If we take this approach on, and take the literal  meaning that we could ONLY speak 90 words each during the 30 minute performance, as statistically that is what one would do, we would not be able to speak at all throughout the rest of the performance.

We will be testing this task tomorrow (20/3) Please check back then for further progress.

 

 

“Every 20 Seconds…….”

“Every 20 seconds a child dies from drinking contaminated water.”

Working on the basis that our performance is 30 minutes long, in theory, 90 children will die due to drink contaminated water as it takes place.
90 plastic cup are arranged uniformly on the floor.  Each one is filled up with water to the same level.
Every 20 seconds the water from one of the cups has to be expelled. This could involve it being drunk by a performer or audience member, poured onto a performer, thrown into the audience or poured onto the floor.
Perhaps the harsh reality of this statistic can not be fully appreciated until we as performers show complete disregard to it and waste clean water.
Will the audience feel guilt over our waste of water??
Will it make them consider the amount of water they waste everyday??

Smartie Mission – Stan’s Cafe

Smartie Mission was a follow-up project by Stan’s Cafe Theatre Company, which came after Of All The People In All The World. The company wanted to make the piece accessible to children, whilst maintaining the idea of visually representing statistics. The piece involved the participating children counting out and measuring different food stuffs to represent different statistics. Wealth/poverty, sea levels, mountain heights etc.

The theatre company states on their website that this project made a conscious effort to have it’s audience “take control of as many aspects of the production as possible” (Stan’s Cafe, 2011). I really like this ‘hands-on’ approach to this type of performance/instillation.  Allowing the audience to participate, whether they are children or adults, would hopefully help them to better understand the size and scale of each statistic that is being presented.

I would like to experiment with this type of audience participation, giving roles to audience member, responsibilities that they have to carry out in order for the piece to progress.

The website for Stan’s Cafe can be found here: http://www.stanscafe.co.uk/project-smartie-mission.html

Of All The People In All The World – Stan’s Cafe.

Of All The People In All The World is a live performance art piece/installation by Stan’s Cafe Theatre Company. The aim of the piece is to bring statistics to “startling and powerful life” (Stan’s Cafe, 2011). Each grain of rice presented in the piece is representational of one human being. The rice has been counted and measured into various piles to visually show the amounts of people involved in different events throughout history. These events include:

– the populations of towns and cities
– the number of doctors, the number of soldiers
– the number of people born each day, the number who die
– all the people who have walked on the moon
– deaths in the holocaust
(Stan’s Cafe, 2011).

The audience move around the instillation, viewing,  considering and comparing the piles of rice. The performers, dressed simply is white lab coats, clinically measure out the rice as part of an on-going process.

I was really intrigued and inspired by this piece. The notion of being able to represent things of such large scale (hundreds and thousands of people at a time), on stage or within a room prompted me to consider the challenge of represent statistics visually as performance. The relationship between the strict, mathematical, linear nature of statistic and the fluid, creative nature of performance art is something that I am looking forward to exploring.

A link to Stan’s Cafe website for this piece is : http://www.stanscafe.co.uk/ofallthepeople/

Video footage from Of All The People In All The World:

 

Statistics

Statistics- Collecting and analysing numerical data.

To some they are simply numbers, clinical, devoid of emotion. They are simply facts.

However it might be argued that some statisticus have the power to evoke an emotional response, particularly those regarding illness and death.

Some simply baffle their reader.  It might be suggested that to some people it becomes difficult to comprehend some statistics. I personally find it extremely difficult to process some of the information. This is perhaps because statistics are in number form. They dehumanise the subject, and also because more often than not, the figures are so high it becomes hard to imagine that number.

This is one of the ideas we have explored throughout this process. As a result of a discussion we discussed ways in which we can represent statistics, but rather than using numbers, we intend to use a visual language.

At the start of this process we all individually researched some statistics that we might use in the production. Please find below, some of the statistics that I found:

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