In the latest session our site was dressed with our props and set, and seeing them in the site showed us how homely a non-place can become with household items. Although we have many props to create our scene, we still have many more items to add and buy. The completion of this will extensively help create the feeling of ‘place’, and specifically the feeling of ‘home’.
We rehearsed a performance around our last ideas (mentioned in previous post) and practised with teabags, biscuits, books, cleaning products and a pack of cards. With these we paid attention on deconstructing the household products. We also focused on the fluctuation of place and non-place (and other opposites) whilst creating the performance to see how we could incorporate the audience member into the piece.
Once we showed Steve and Conan what we had created, we received feedback to make the performance simpler, and making the audience member feel unsafe/trapped/etc made them feel irritated and bored and there was no contribution to creating a place from a non-place. It also became clear when seeing the props in the space that natural speech between us and an audience member could potentially come quiet easily as the feeling of the site was much more homely than we originally believed it would. Because of this, it was decided that our original idea of creating a non-place into a place through conversational exchange with audience members would work much better than we first believed.
Now that we have finalised our idea, we know exactly where our direction is headed and we know what needs to be achieved before our performance. From seeing what the dressed site looked like with the items we have, we have now made a final list of items we still need to obtain to make the setting even more like a home. We are also creating a list of questions that we will ask out audience member, these are simple questions, such as “what is your name?”, “can I take your coat?”, “would you like a seat?” and “do you feel comfortable?”. We will also rehearse exactly what each person will do in the performance, and how they can chip into the conversation naturally when they aren’t the main person conversing with the audience.
We are feeling much more confident with our idea now that we have had constructive feedback and seen the props and set in the space.