It Just Takes You To Another Place - Performance Footage

I have written in more detail about this practice as research investigation on the 'Academic Process' page, so please feel free to have a read of the reasons for conducting the practice. I shall just offer my opinions on the experience as I reflect back on the work. The research symposium was a really useful tool for me to try out, again, my interest in the exhausted body in performance. I always feel slightly strange saying that I am fascinated in the artist experiencing pain, I am not odd I promise you, but I am really interested in the relationship between audience and a suffering performer. I feel that the practice was successful in terms of my own personal journey through to a state of exhaustion. I really enjoy challenging myself physically and mentally, and enjoy the results of dancing for a six hour period. Again, I am not odd I swear. It’s the adrenaline and the rush to achieve something that excites me, and the affect that viewing me suffering has on general audience members as well as those closest to me. I often think that I would love the opportunity to whiteness another body undergoing the same pressures so I could see how it feels as an outside eye. For me the practice was really powerful, but of course I was the person physically feeling the mixture of passion, exhaustion, energy, adrenaline and desperation. It felt electric. But for an audience, I wonder just how much they really ‘felt it’ or were even interested in me dancing erratically on stage for that matter. I had Elvis singing Polk Salad Annie to me through the headphones and the crescendo powerfully bursting my ear drums, but for the audience, watching in silence, I question how engaging the sounds of my breath and footsteps were. Whilst performing on stage, I sensed that people were intrigued in the work; mostly due to the looks of concern for my safety. However, I feel that with them being disconnected to me because of the headphones, and unable to hear the music, they were disconnected for me in a way. This clashed in a sense with the entire purpose for the practice as research, in that I wanted to experiment with the relationship between roles but I disallowed myself to do so; I put a barrier between the two. This was something that I picked up on in the audience feedback forms, with a number of people feeling as though my experience was isolated and disconnected from them. This isn’t exactly what I had hoped would be the case. I could have possibly created other ways of communicating with them, whilst still using the headphones, possibly dancing through the audience space or holding cards with text on. Just more ways of communicating with them and channelling my experience to them so that they could have felt a stronger sense of emotions. I also feel that I could have made my questions more precise in the audience questionnaire forms to gain a better understanding of how the experience affected them. On reflection, my questions were too broad, which is frustrating because I only made them that way because I was concerned about not giving them enough freedom to answer and not steer them in a direction of how I wanted the results to go. I will definitely be seeking more expert help next time I have to create a questionnaire,

---