In March 1998 I went to Exmoor with my parents for my first ever play in the snow. So today was the day for a first play. The first day I had a kind of booked
performance, a first time for me to try to vaguely string some of my creations
together and to play. I was sue to be performing in the Tubestation café in Polzeath at 3pm,
so I set off at first light from Port Isaac, with some loose ideas of what I
might try when I got there. The challenge I was faced with was how to perform
in a café environment, where nobody had actually come to see me, people would
be leaving and arriving all the time, and there would be lots of young excited
children around! As I am working in quite a fragmented way, with my mini
performances not really relating to each other, they therefore lend themselves
to a fragmented performance anyway, I just needed to come up with some sort of
framing to sew them all together. I had a bit of a panic moment when I was
walking as I realised how silly it would be to suddenly turn my performance
into a static happenings locked to one space, when my whole project is about
walking, and most of my idea formed when I was walking between locations; I
decided it was essential to somehow include this in the structure of the
performance. I decided that in order to suit the nature of a café environment,
I would leave the café in between each mini performance and go for a walk. The
walk would be a relative amount of time to the distance between the locations
that my creations had been made in. These walks between performances had
several practical advantages as well as artistic meaning: 1) It would give me a
chance to decide what I would perform next and how I would perform it. 2) It
would give me a chance to assess how the previous performance had gone and
effectively edit my style and adapt as I went along. 3) It would give me a
chance to run away and leave the space if a performance didn’t go down well.
After frantically calling several friends to hear their thoughts on the idea I
decided to go for it. I knew it would be a complete experiment, and I knew it
might weird people out, but it seemed like a perfect format for the environment.
I arrived a the Tubestation to find that it is this amazing café/church/surf
club with a half pipe skate ramp inside the café!! With a very chilled out vibe
and not very many people about I knew it would be perfect to really go for some
crazy experimentation and try some stuff out. The performance overall went
pretty much as I expected and lasted for about an hour, people were quite
confused and wierded out, but on the whole found the whole thing quite
fascinating I think. I got the sense that they hadn't seen anything like this
before which was quite nice for me to be able to share something new with them.
Some of the mini fragments went down really well with laughs and big applause,
others kind of died on their arses which was GREAT. I’ve now got an idea of
what people liked and didn’t and am really keen to develop my ideas based on
what I’ve learned. So overall I can’t explain how useful this kind of early
scratch performance has been to me.
The café manager Joff very kindly let me come back and sleep
on his sofa. In the evening I ended up at a sort of leaving do for one of the
people from the Tubestation which was a surreal experience. I met so many
lovely people including Hayden and Rachel a couple from New Zealand who are
living in Polzeath for the winter and working at the Tubestation, they told me
so many great stories of their travels all over the world with plenty of
hilarious stories mixed in, some of which I might tweek and share later in my
journey. I also met Tom who is a National Trust ranger charged with looking
after much of the coastline I have spent the last few days walking – which by
the way was my favourite coastline so far. He told me some pretty scary stories
about rock falls, parts of the path disappearing into the sea and dead dogs!
Anyway I am off to catch the ferry to Padstow now! I have a
few videos from today and a video of my performance which I will upload soon
(the internet connection here is awful!) See you soon world.
'others kind of died on their arses which was GREAT.' hahaha.
ReplyDeletesounds so difficult and stressful having to design a performance for a space you know nothing about!! sounds like you rose to the challenge and did really well though