Session 5

Attendees:
Mauro
James
Hedva
Sara
2 guests (belonging to Hedva)
Lea
Leslie

Activities of the Day:

Development:
Hedva actually started the day off by performing the latest version of the monologue she has been working on the past couple of weeks. It was wonderful to see how it has come over such a short time. There should be a performance of it in the not so distant future.

Restrictions:
Lea read a piece she had written in response to the stimulus. She read it in both Italian and Spanish, and then finally in English. One of Hedva's guests remarked, "The English was a catharsis," because Lea had struggle with the pronunciation of the first two languages. The struggle was in part an attempt to consider one of the sentences, and maintain a sense of "live-ness" in the performance. Here is the text:

Sometimes I want everything all at once so quickly that I think I will drown. The space between the woman I want to become and the woman I am is epic. Or it is not. Sometimes it seems like an inch, then I turn my head and it is three leagues off, then four, then a thousand years away, or it already happened. Sometimes I do not know where I am. Sometimes the air reminds me of the exact air that surrounded me years ago, of places I do not remember but can still sense. Sometimes I talk about events like the Great War, or the French countryside, as if I had some knowledge of them, but I was not around then and there, I do not know them. They do not know me. Sometimes I wish I existed only in sound, in a musical note, surrounded by reverberations and breath, and not in this body, just a shell surrounding myself that is still mysterious, and if I could only just see it maybe I would not want anything else anymore.

Feedback:
Mauro shared a play he has translated from Spanish to English, and is currently working to translate to his native Portuguese. It was a short play by Rodrigo Garcia, called Killing the Hours. For an interesting article on a reaction to Garcia's work, please go here.

Leslie shared some images of the work she had contributed to in Germany for the transmediale festival. One of the thoughts the art work focused on was why climate change means cultural change. For the festival's website, go here.


And that's it, friends. No sentences this week, as we have concluded The Space (in) Between for this term. Thanks to all who participated in the sessions. Thank you for taking the time to share your talents, interests, and artistic endeavours with us and letting us help you when we could and when you needed it. Here's to a great third term!

FINAL SESSION OF THE SPACE

Hullo Spacers and voyeurs of the net-

Last Friday didn't come together in terms of The Space, but thanks to everyone that took the time to let me know they wouldn't be able to make it. It's great to know it's on some people's minds.

In light of the gruelling rehearsal process and work load of both Stage Two Practice and the research projects, The Space's final session will occur this Friday, 27 February at 2PM in PS2. Please prepare the Five Sentences posted from the previous session if you are responding to the stimulus. All in all, it would just be great to see the lot of you and get your feedback in terms of what was useful, fun, helpful, or frustrating about the work that happened for, around, because of, or in spite of The Space.

Thanks again, and look forward to seeing you,
Lea

If you're too comfortable, you may need to ask yourself what you're *not* doing.

"In the end it all comes down to this: you have a choice (or more accurately a rolling tangle of choices) between giving your work your best shot and risking that it will not make you happy, or not giving it your best shot--and thereby guaranteeing that it will not make you happy. It becomes a choice between certainty and uncertainty. And curiously, uncertainty is the comforting choice."

--David Bayles and Ted Orland, Art & Fear: Observations On The Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking

CHANGE OF LOCATION: SESSION 5

NOTE: Session 5 on 20 February 2009 will take place downstairs in the Hampstead Theatre. Be there.

Session 4

Attendees:
Lea
Mauro
Leslie
Maria
Ronan
Loukia
Ariana
Hugo

Activities of the Day:

Restrictions:
Lea started the day off by first sharing her artifact (a photograph of herself and her mother) and then showing a short film she made in response to last week's second and fourth sentences ("Create a story with a pencil," & "Find something extraordinary about something ordinary."). There it is, just below. It has no audio, but is still affective. At least Mauro thought so.

A discussion was prompted by the film about the "silly" sometimes having tragic qualities, and what it is to apply human attributes to inanimate objects. Ronan commented on the ability to impose feeling in the piece with just words: you didn't have to show the pencil moving to show that he was happy. The group touched on alienation for a moment, discussing how the audience is suddenly responsible for that part of the equation<--the inferring of the pencil's happiness, the pen's forlorn look, etc. There is an active engagement there that may not have happened if the photographic segments had actually been filmed action, and without that engagement the viewer may not have been as invested. The topic of audience participation in this manner came up again later in the session. The film Stranger Than Fiction was also referenced.

Hedva brought in a small elephant as her artifact, and he sadly lost his only remaining eye during the session. Ronan gave him new eyes with tape, as you can see.

Photo by Lea McKenna-Garcia

The little guy was from Thailand, and was quite cute up close, it must be said.

Development:
Hedva brought in a monologue dealing further with the experiment she had brought up last week. It was a piece of writing blending Brechtian style and themes with verbatim text, and incorporating as well as discussing a monologue by the character Agrado in Pedro Almodovar's film Todo Sobre Mi Madre (All About My Mother). Various feedback was given regarding the structure and content of the monologue, and we hope that Hedva will bring in the next draft of this work next week for us to see its development. The content of the monologue has been kept out of this blog for copyright purposes. If you are interested in what could come of blending an Almodovar monologue, verbatim text, and Brechtian narrative style, please feel free to join us next week and discover it first-hand. (Assuming, of course, you practice Advanced Theatre.)

Leslie joined us this week, and first handed out business cards for her latest artwork.* Then she showed the beginning of the film Space is the Place, and discussed how she was attempting to develop a piece in the same spirit of the film (psychedelic scifi) for the theatre with some fellow MAers. She hopes to have a large emphasis on LoFi effects and equipment. Again we started talking about what an audience invests if they're asked to do a little work, and the difference between the journey they go on when they have to investigate or bridge a gap on their own instead of having everything fed to them. The proposal of this piece excited many, and we hope to hear more about it as it develops.

Leslie also briefly introduced a project she is helping with called "Society of Molecules ," and plans on discussing that more fully next week.

The idea of the similarity between the labels "theatre" and "live art" was touched on briefly as well, but not expanded on. Perhaps we'll delve into that next week also.

*(Please call 0800 756 6662 for more information.)

The Five Sentences for this week:

SENTENCES ASSIGNED TO BE SHARED FRIDAY, 20 FEBRUARY:

1. You can only use two feet of space (0.6 meters).
   
2. Incorporate a language that is not your native language.
   
3. “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!”
   
4. Revisit a sentence from a previous week and re-examine it.
   
5. All art is personal and autobiographical.

Don't worry if you're surrounded by an ocean...

"One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time."
--Andre Gide

Session 3

Attendees:
Lea
Loukia
Ariana
Ronan
Hedva

Activities of the Day:
Bit of a late start to the day--the snow has delayed everything this week, including our diligence regarding time it seems.

Restrictions:
Ariana started us off by reading a list of things she wrote of things she had faith in. Then she discussed the aspects of relatability in the first definition of "congeniality" and how that figured between the ideas of death and inevitability.

Ronan read a piece of writing he composed about his family listing off his father, his sisters, and his brother, at one point stating, "I have faith in what I make," all while cutting cardboard and piecing it together with sellotape. Below, you can see this congenial, personalized, humorous chair:

Photo taken by Lea McKenna-Garcia

Lea shared a piece of writing she had started but not completed, that would have been meant to been a voice over to a piece of physical movement that involved a chair. She also offered an opening image for the piece, and experiments with a body and chair that she had worked on at home. Below, one of those images:

Photo taken by Heidi O'Connell

Development:
Hedva discussed looking for a monologue written in the style of Brecht (one that had elements of alienation, a journey, and a moral at the end) for an experiment she is trying. None were thought of during the session, but perhaps by next week we may have come up with an answer for this. (Have a suggestion? Please leave a comment on this blog post.)

To end the day, Ariana explored a little physical work with a chair, while Ronan read aloud a small piece of text she had brought in:

The Five Sentences for this week:

SENTENCES ASSIGNED TO BE SHARED FRIDAY, 13 FEBRUARY:

1. Bring in an artifact.
   
2. Create a story with a pencil.
3. Write the line before and after this statement: "I haven't started yet."
4. Find something extraordinary about something ordinary.
   
5. All art is personal and autobiographical.

Reaction to the Five Sentences from Session One

Here are two images Lea created in response to the first Five Sentences issued at Session One, and presented during Session Two on 30 January.

The text from the first image is from Hamlet, and the second from the Brecht poem, "The Legend of the Harlot Evelyn Roe."