As I re-visted my site last week with Steve Fossey, it became clear that I hand’t gave that much thought as to where I would place my audience and how I would interact with them. As we walked around my space it became clear that this was also the case for the buildings and structures within my site. Currently my site has a lot of ‘alcoves’ and scaffolding which can be used within my performance, as Steve rightly said, I need to make sure I’m using my site to its greatest potential.
After much thought and through trial and error I have decided my audience should be free to walk about the site and watch my performance through their own choice. As my the themes and topic of my performance talks greatly about consent and by allowing my audience to decided where they stand and what they see, as their position will change their perspective, allows them to, metaphorically speaking, give consent.
I’ve been in my site times practically trialling out ideas and my script, however so far only a few things have worked. One idea which I am to keen with is the idea of Détournement. Détournemen is “an artistic practice conceived by the Situationists for transforming artworks by creatively disfiguring them” (Oxfordreference.com, 2016).
A massive part of today’s rape culture is the campaign material published by the police force and government. This campaign material is supposed to ‘fight rape’ but in fact blames women instead, telling them how they could ‘stop’ themselves from being attacked.
Like the Situationists, plan to ‘deface’ these posters, that suggest rape is a side effect of alcohol or that women are at fault for their friends being victims. This victim blaming is a regular occurrence in the campaign posters created by the police forces and government. I want to make it clear that instead of victim blaming and telling women what not to do, so that they don’t become a victim, we should be targeting the predators. I also think it’s important to note how these posters target women, though men can be and are also victims of sexual assault.
Another idea that I’ve tried practically, that i’m going to offer drinks or either water or juice to the audience. This touching upon the idea that if someone buys you a drink on a night out or offers you drinks at a party they expect sex or sexual favours in return. I’m planning to hand this out at the start of the performance and have the audience wonder why I’m giving them this drink as it wont be mentioned until further on. The when this point is raised I’m hoping the audience will realise how wrong this expectation is.
My next step forwards is to keep devising and trying out new ideas, as well as adding more theory to my performance in order to support it.
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