K r Buxey

On the subject of performers I wanted to talk about a piece I saw at the Seduced exhibition at the Barbican. The piece consisted of a large screen in a dark room and Gabriel Faure’s Requiem of 1877, playing. On the screen was K r Buxey. The piece was called Requiem and it showed K r Buxey reaching orgasm.

I loved the fact that the orgasm was real because there are so many women faking it in porn. The fact that she was receiving oral sex and reaching orgasm was a statement in itself but the sheer size of the screen and the intensity of the music which was used really confrontational. This is another example of media being used to provoke a shift in mood within the audience.
An exerpt from the film piece.

(Wallace, M & Kemp,M & Bernstein, J, 2007:240)

Bibliography
Wallace, M & Kemp, M & Bernstein, J (2007) Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquity to Now. London: Merrell Publishers Limited

Franko B

Still Life, 2005

(Johnson, D and Oliva, A and B, F and Jones, A and Davis V, 2007:86)

I have just finished doing an essay on how body based artists utilize blood in their work and I wrote about Franko B. Whilst researching Franko B I was very interested by his use of lighting in his performances. Whilst looking through his book I encountered photographs that instantly caught my attention. The photographs were part of his performances of Still Life 2005 where Franko B paints himself white, lays upon a lit bed whilst bleeding, after that he leaves the bed. The way the light lit up his body highlighted all of the contours and I found the light shining through the blood a beautiful image as it changed the colour of the light and it was a real contrast between the red and white light.

So, after finding out about this performance I looked at some more of his performances and found that light was a reoccurring theme in his performances. I read about a performance called Don’t Leave Me This Way which in my opinion used lighting in such a creative and original way.

‘In Don’t Leave Me This Way’ a new piece who’s earliest manifestation is also documented here, Franko B’s body is presented naked and unpainted, seated on a raised plinth or altar. The audience is allowed time to look at his body, to approach it as a sculptural form. After a short time, a bank of bright lights floods the audience, forcing them to avert their gaze. Carefully choreographed, this blinding technique mimics the effect that his exposed body has on the audience in the bleeding pieces, while striving for new affective proximities: diverse emotional and bodily responses.’ (Johnson, D and Oliva, A and B, F and Jones, A and Davis V, 2007:12)


using light to recreate the feelings that his bleeding pieces produced is something that I have no come across before. At his performances viewers have been described to cry, wince, and turn away and even pass out. (Johnson, D and Oliva, A and B, F and Jones, A and Davis V, 2007:12)
These emotions have been caused because the audience are watching someone loose copious amounts of blood, so to use light to create such a feeling is quite inventive.

Here is a link to his performance of Don’t Leave Me This Way, I hope you can check it out.

http://www.franko-b.com/dont_leave_me_this_way.htm

I think he is performing this piece at the ICA in London in June so I really want to go and see it and see what kind of effect the harsh lighting has on me.


Bibliography

Johnson, D and Oliva, A and B, F and Jones, A and Davis V (2007) Franko B: Blinded by Love. Italy: Damiani

The audience.

Many of our pieces have involved audience such as me an rachels Light/Dart. I like to work in this way as the outcome of the whole piece rests on the audience's decisions and i like the risk factor involved with that. Light/Dart didnt go as smoothly as planned but as an experiment it was successfull and, for me, fun to experience the audiences reactions when left to their own devices.

For Light/Dart and the assessment before hand with the projectors, the audience were a large part of the performance. meaning that there would not have been a performance without the audience participating. A development to this work would be to perform it to the general public as then there may be more of a range of outcomes and the risk of sabotage would increase.

As said in our feed back our projection piece had similarities to Marina Abramovic's Rhythm 0 and i can agree with that point although Rhythm 0 was much more risky as the audience were able to use objects on a real body as opposed to our audience drawing objects which were projected onto a body.

As i said before Light/Dart was an experiment, as was our projections piece. What i descovered with the projection piece was that while some of the audience did what i expected (drawing boobs and penis's) some of the audience were very creative and i think that devising work in this way with an audience could lead to some very original work. Kinda wish i had thought of doing that earlier on in the course!

talking about all this durational stuff today has really made me think.

iv not done much durational stuff, and the stuff i have done i have always found quite hard.

In choreographic lab we were given a durational exercise and i decided to repeat the same score for half an hour. one of the movements in this score was drawing a line on the floor with my finger. By then end of it the end of my finger had gone numb and started to hurt.

I wonder what would have happened if i had done it for a whole day, or more! I have seen performances where dancers danced with paint on paper and then sold the painting afterwards but what if a durational movement piece took place on paper. i mean like a really long durational piece. soon the paper would wear and you might even draw blood as i am sure my finger would have bled if i had done that score for long enough. What would be left on the paper? It would be like a recording of the performance.

DUH!


wow. the blog is not in my routine yet so keep forgetting about it. got it written on my hand now though!by participatory i mean performance that is interactive with the audience and breaks the fourth wall convention. As for the dvd we were shown in class for me that was what i would call a cinematic experience when it comes to multimedia use in performance. apart from maybe the interaction between performer and media? its getting complicated now, i must give it more thought.i actually really enjoyed our assessment and probably should write about it.for our piece we used: •Small diaphragm condenser microphone.•XLR Cable.•Mixer.•XLR to jack.•Headphones.whilst experimenting with the equipment we found the use of the headphones intensified the sonic experience for the audience member and experimented further.we soon came up with the idea of whispering in the audience members ear only they would be wearing the headphones and through one side would be a mediatised voice and the other would be the performer talking into the audience members ear. We felt that gossiping would be a good topic to draw the audience member in but we only gave them 30 seconds to listen. the space was set up so that the audience member could see the person who's voice was being mediatised and was sitting next to the other whispering performer whilst the class was lined up and given time slots by janice. the reason i enjoyed doing it was because the media was completley intergrated within the piece although it wasnt the focus. It was also a bit of a test to see how long we could talk continually! I wonder what would have happened if it were over a longer period of time. looking at the things posted on NILE i really loved one of the filmed pieces, although i cannot find it now! maybe it was removed? but it was the one where all the performers were lined up and they simply took their tops off but the film was on a loop so it looked like they kept pulling their tops up then down. it was a bit of an illusion because i thought they were actually moving like that! felt a bit stupid when i realised what was happening but i really loved it and had to watch it a couple more times.
06 February 2008 12:18

shame!

iv been making comments instead of posting on my blog. So here the are!

I guess the reason why i consider alot of the multimedia performances i have seen and read about cinematic is because it is mainly visual and not participatory, just like in the cinema. I have often been able to interact with the performers but the multimedia usually came in the form of a projection or music which i had to sit back and look at and listen to. i found the mic performance in class merged performer, audience and multimedia into one. For me, if one of those components was missing it would not have been successfull.

Multimedia and Performance

Hello. this is my blog.

lesson 1.

I found what simon did with the camera, mic and headphones so simple but extremly effective. For me this has helped because when i think of multimedia in performance i think of big projections and really overpowering stuff like that. i kind of see it as more of a cinema experience. (if that makes any sense). But as was explained in the lesson, some of the old technology is still pretty successfull and i agree.