Reflections on Scottee's Entertainment Value Workshop:
For me the first day of the workshop was like the first day back at school after a long summer break. I was still in vacation mode and it was really challenging to come up with new performance works on the spot. I enjoyed the getting to know you exercise at the start of the workshop when everyone talked about their work vis-à-vis a prop, poem or image, etc. (I brought in my Sarah Palin Genital Panic costume including beaver.) The other performers in the workshop (Liz Clark, Rebecca Weeks, Victoria Melody, Scarlett Lassoff, Kayla St Claire and Ophelia Bitz) were all fascinating women and I wanted to know more about all of them. I also really enjoyed hearing the story of Scottee’s awakening to the world of performance through a workshop at the Camden’s People’s Theatre when he was around 15 years old and living in a nearby council estate. He thought he was signing up for something along the lines of ‘play-acting’ but ended up being exposed to avant-garde anti-theatre and did his first ever performance in the very room in which the workshop took place. This involved the audience (which was made up of his and the other participants’ parents) being blindfolded, subjected to loud music, squirted with water and slapped with playing cards.
The warm-ups were standard drama school stuff, walking at our own speed, mirroring each other and then breaking out into our own paces. We then were asked to come up with three poses from a past performance that we had done and came up with 3 new ones as a group. In pairs we sat in chairs and struck these poses at irregular rhythms, moving on impulse, sometimes mirroring one another, sometimes interacting. Then we spent a little more time learning each other’s names and paired up to tell 3 truths and 1 lie about ourselves, repeating these facts about our partner to the group we had to then decide which was the lie.
The next activity was browsing through gossip magazines and tearing out anything that appealed to us. I had a hard time finding anything to rip out. Scottee said we had 40 minutes to come up with either an academic essay, a performance piece or an installation based on one story we had found. I couldn’t come up with anything; I wasn’t even sure what story to pick. Everyone seemed to be getting on ok. The second part of the task was to come up with a cabaret performance, a song or a stand-up comedy routine based around the same article. I now intellectually understood the exercise in that it was trying to get us to think about ‘high-art’ frameworks verses ‘low-art’ ones. The first part was meant to be academic/serious/high brow and the second part light entertainment. Unfortunately understanding this didn’t really make it any easier for me.
The ideas I had for the first part were already fitting better into the second category and yet that didn't make coming up with a second performance any easier either. I already merge these two categories in my work as a matter of course, so for the purpose of the exercise I decided at that point to purposely make something ‘serious’, a work of ‘performance art’ for the first piece and something stereotypically cabaret. In both cases I did something I wouldn't normally do. The story I chose was about girl of 18 who decided to be a stay-at-home mom and housewife to her 17 yr-old fiancé who went out to work. For the first 'serious' performance I did a reenactment of Faith Wilding’s Waiting (1971) but changed it to I couldn’t wait. I mimed a vacuuming motion repeatedly whilst describing 'my' life as the girl in the article, ‘I couldn’t wait to be born, I couldn’t wait to wear make-up, I couldn’t wait to have a boyfriend, I couldn’t wait to have a baby, I couldn’t wait to bake cupcakes, I couldn’t wait to run a hot bath for my husband after his long day at work, I couldn’t wait to cash my first tax benefit cheque’, etc. The feedback was fairly positive, but I don’t think anyone got the reference to Wilding’s performance.
Most of the other participant’s performances were fantastic, really humorous and playful or thoughtful and well-composed. Rebecca focused her academic essay on an article that claimed Jack The Ripper might have been a woman - she evaluated it as if it were a piece of literature using the strategy of gender reversal. Scottee remarked that he was surprised how much gender entered into all of our pieces, but Rebecca commented that it was perhaps because of how gendered the subject matter was - gossip rags are made for women.
I wasn’t very happy with what I had done, not simply because it’s a knee-jerk response for me to cite a Womanhouse work, but also because it felt strange to make something about someone else, a story in a magazine that I wouldn’t normally read. The exercise made me conscious of my own preferences/limitations – that I find it easy to rely on the work that pre-dates me, that I am driven to make work that is personal to me, that I prefer complexity. Since the starting point for the exercise was by default superficial – a trashy magazine article – I didn’t feel right simply being critical, that would have felt too judgmental and simplistic. How could I judge this person, who is most likely more complicated than the article conveys, who probably sold her story out of financial need? Even though I chose the article because I do relate to her desires, I didn’t think to implicate myself in my performance, maybe because I was thinking a little too literally about the assignment. Or maybe I was embarrassed to admit these feelings. Perhaps if I had it would have been a more satisfying piece. I was reticent to perform the piece I'd thought of for the second part of the task, but did a sort of burlesque number, trying to seduce the audience with the persona of this girl who just wanted to have a baby and be a housewife. Again, I didn't really allow myself to get into the work on a personal level, too embarrassed to perform in that way and express those thoughts even under the guise that they were really someone else's. It was strange that despite thinking of the workshop as a place to experiment and take risks, I didn't allow myself to do so fully. It still felt too public, not the safe space that female-dominated environments are theoretically supposed to be.
We started the second day with improvisation exercises, firstly to create a story, each person adding a sentence or two. Then we did an Augusto Boal exercise in which two people shake hands, they freeze and one exits, a third person enters posing so as to create a new narrative, and so on, sometimes poses would include a third and fourth person, then we could manipulate each other’s bodies to change the story or add language into people’s mouths. I’m intrigued to learn more about Boal, not just his dramatic games and exercises but about his life and work. Then we did an exercise called ‘Hotseat’ in which each person had to create a persona and respond to interrogation-like questions from everyone else. The questions that are asked can really steer the interview and the adopted personality in a different direction, demanding off-the-cuff responses. For example, one of Scottee’s questions for one of the artist’s was “Marina, why have you turned away from durational work towards characterisation?” When it was my turn, I ended up being a woman with my own chicken farm who survived on the eggs as well as berries and wild mushrooms I foraged. She/I was part of a cult-like church that forbid the wearing of purple. I read everyone’s chakras and for some reason I got very emotional when Scottee asked me if I would like some help with the use of colour in my own fashion choices.
We had been asked to bring in a piece of music that we would like to use in a performance and were then given 20 minutes to prepare a contemporary dance piece, movement or jumping around to it using the tools of impulse, rhythm and improvisation that we had learned. Without giving it much thought I brought in the title track of Marlo Thomas and friend’s album Free to Be You and Me. It was not in fact a song that I’d wanted to work with, just one that I really liked. Other people confessed to taking the same approach, but in my mind they had much stronger results. After I ran around, skipping and prancing to the banjo beat of ‘Free To Be You and Me’, pretending to be a flowing river and using a lot of jazz-hands, it was interpreted by Scarlett as an advertisement for the hippy lifestyle.
photo: Darrell Berry
She probably wasn’t too far off, but Scottee read it as a musical number from the bible-belt which was strange and I felt a little stereotyped as an American. Scarlett did an anti-striptease number wherein her pointedly un-sexy sock controlled the rest of her body in wanting to be rolled up and down her calf. Rebecca’s performance to PJ Harvey’s ‘Rid of Me’ was for me the most moving performance of the two days, full of pain yet totally seductive – the kind of work I don’t have the guts to do except perhaps as pastiche.
Scottee then lead the group through a guided visualisation as we lay on the floor in the dark. After some deep breathing and relaxing of the muscles, we were told to picture ourselves sinking into warm sand and being engulfed. Then I was told I was stepping into the spotlight of a cabaret stage and performing, the audience loved me. Then (as Scottee described) I stepped off stage and my costume changed. The room turned white and I was in the centre performing again and being warmly received by the audience. After resurfacing to the beach among friends, Scottee then drew the visualisation to a close. He asked us to reveal what we saw during the two performances within the visualisation. In the cabaret setting I had pictured myself showing an egg to people at The Royal Vauhall Tavern and in the second part I was at my own wedding about to kick off the first dance and I wondered what song would play. Some of the other artists had had quite elaborate visions of performances and costumes. I realised after that this white space was probably intended by Scottee to signify a gallery space. He gave us the homework assignment to somehow recreate these imaginings as a photograph or some kind of still image, not to question why we were doing it, but simply to make it happen.
After that we didn’t have much time left and were told to work individually to develop a performance piece that we wanted to do but hadn’t yet made. We were to develop the piece using the following tools that had come up throughout the workshop: visualisation, hot-seat character improvisation, improvisational storytelling, impulse, narrative poses, cycles & repetitive movement, live art installation or academic paper, cabaret piece, song, comedy routine. This was tough, yet again because I hadn’t really come very prepared. I found it difficult to choose what work to develop and before I knew it time was up. We then had one minute each to pitch the idea and a few minutes for feedback. I pitched an idea for a performance art musical but ran out of time before I could really get into the details of it.
In a way, a piece of musical theatre about performance art would fulfill the premise of this particular workshop to a tee – and it’s an idea I had years ago, but haven’t fully developed. I wish I had been able to focus my mind on that project from the very start of the workshop and I might have been able to get more out of all of the exercises. I guess I was hoping to get new ideas and move my work in directions I hadn’t previously taken, rather than rehashing or redeveloping old ones. In the end I left a little disappointed.
About two years ago people started referring to me as a performance artist. The label stuck because I seemed to be doing more and more performance and I preferred being called that than ‘video artist’. Since becoming part of the trashing performance research group lead by Gavin Butt, I’ve started to question the gallery space as the default location for my work and become interested in trying out the cabaret scene. It sounded great when Gavin talked about the itinerancy of certain performance artists going from club venue to gallery space to TV chat show. I think I could have something to say in each of those arenas and I’m curious to see how the varying audiences in those locations would respond to my work. I saw participating in this workshop as a step in that direction, but left feeling that that premise and desire went unexplored. Instead it was a place to try out new techniques, experiment and meet new people.
More pics of the workshop can be found on Scottee's blog.
