All the way back when we started coming up with our idea for a performance piece, one certain thing that we had looked at in class had stood out to us since the very start. It was a piece by a group called Forced Entertainment, that was entitled; ‘12AM; Awake and Looking Down’. Forced Entertainment are a group of performers based in Sheffield, but who tour all around the world, who are; “interested in making performances that excite, challenge, question and entertain other people. We’re interested in confusion as well as laughter” (Times, 2017). Their piece ‘12AM; Awake and Looking Down’ “is a physical and visual performance that explores the relation between object and label, image and text” (Times, 2017). Watching this performance is absolutely fascinating, as Forced Entertainment challenge what we know about characters, and labels, by giving their performers the exact keys they need to portray their character to the audience on a piece of cardboard. By having their characters written down for the audience to see, there is little to no guess work when it comes to audiences trying to figure out what it is they’re watching. They’re being told right from the start who is on stage and with this, they can form a small idea of what is going to happen.
We really adored this concept of showing, without telling. I particularly found it fascinating how Forced Entertainment could give you all the information required for a character, but still present it in a way which was entertaining and engaging. We wanted to know how we could take this blatant presentation of character, and yet still have a performance that would keep the audience engaged, and guessing. At which point, we thought to ourselves, why not create a performance based around the use of cardboard? The use of cardboard, specifically, to show character? What if we could tell our audience exactly what they were going to see, but still surprise them and keep them interested in our performance?
For a while we struggled to think of a way to do that. During a rehearsal however, during a scene between ‘The most hated man alive’ and ‘an arsehole’, when the time came to perform it, my partner and went straight into a scene about how the most hated man alive is really just misunderstood, and he does want people to like him but keeps messing up all his relationships. At which point, the arsehole would be unexpectedly nice to the most hated man alive. It wasn’t something that was planned, but it still fit in with what we had written on the cardboard. Sure, he’s the most hated man alive, but now the audience know why, it’s not because he’s a bad person, he does try, but it keeps going wrong. And we also had a character who we outright told the audience was an arsehole, but here he was being nice to this misunderstood man who is in many ways similar to him.
This concept really intrigued us, and we wondered what else we could play with in this performance. What other directions could we take it?
References:
Times, T. (2017) About. Available at: http://www.forcedentertainment.com/about/ (Accessed: 22 January 2017).