With our performance piece, the main aspect that we are tackling is that of ‘Ghosting’. In his book The Haunted Stage; Marvin Carlson describes the phenomenon of ‘Ghosting’ as; “the identical thing they (the audience) have encountered before, although now in a somewhat different context” (Carlson, 2003). With this in mind, we chose a performance piece by Forced Entertainment called ‘12am: Awake & Looking Down’ (ForcedEntertainment, 2014) as our main influence to ghost. That performance can be found at this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljsUnsNcSjk. When watching it for the first time, my partner and I really admired how much the performers managed to portray with just a bit of cardboard, some costume and no dialogue. We believed that Forced Entertainment used descriptions of people that the audience would recognise on their cardboard. The performers would pick up a piece of cardboard with a simple character description on it, and then perform it for a short period of time. After a short while, the performers would then change the character all together, to project something that was completely new, while still staying the same. It was the same performance, but different each time. Carlson states in The Haunted Stage that; “On the most basic level all arts are built up of identical material used over and over again, individual words in poetry, tones in music, hues in painting, but these semiotic building blocks carry much of their reception burden in their combinations” (Carlson, 2003). Forced Entertainment took these characters that people have experienced in their lives, whether it be through books, television, real life or however the audience might have recognised them. With these recognisable characters, they created a fascinating piece that manages to entertain consistently.
With that being our main focus of ‘ghosting’, my partner and I then began to think of how we could take influences from their performance and turn it into our own unique piece. We have been given a fifteen minute window to perform in, and in which we thought it would be entertaining to do fifteen separate performances in that period of time. Theatre makers in our modern age always have to be aware of engaging an audience. If they aren’t engaged in a two hour long performance, then they might not exactly gain anything from it. We’re hoping that within our fifteen performances, there will at least be one minute where we engage our audience, and that they are simply entertained, even if it is for just one minute. If the audience do not like what is being shown, then they don’t have to worry about sitting through it for the entire duration of our piece, as it will be replaced by something completely different in no time at all.
So to expand on ‘ghosting’ we crafted together a list of characters that people have experienced in everyday life, or are aware of in some context. We tried our best to have as many different styles of acting expressed through these characters, including some physical theatre, absurdism, naturalism and so forth. With these different styles all thrown together in one big amalgamation of performance, we’re hoping that audience members will be able to watch one minute of our piece and remember a time when they have experienced one of our characters in some capacity.
We made the decision to not have purely theatre references in our characters, as not all audience members would be able to relate to those. There were only so many times in rehearsals that we could recite a monologue from Shakespeare, or interact as characters from Waiting For Godot before we realised that not everybody would recognise what we were doing. We’re hoping, that by having made that decision, it will be more recognisable to a wider range of people.
Bibliography:
Carlson, M. (2003) The haunted stage: The theatre as memory machine (theater: Theory/text/performance). Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.
ForcedEntertainment (2014) 12am: Awake & looking down (clip) Essen, 2014. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljsUnsNcSjk (Accessed: 11 January 2017).