We had our first lab this year last Tuesday, and it was really great to be back in the lab frame of mind and back together after a break since Besides, you lose your soul, or The History of Western Civilisation.

Attendants: Julia, Bill, Zoë.

For this lab we decided to continue working on reacting and responding, and look at the theme of celebrity.  Bill and Zoë were asked to: create something, react and respond to it yourself by going in and out of the action, also referencing levels of address and presence.

In one long improvisation they created small scores, which were then brought back in the subsequent 2 improvisations working on the level of reacting and responding.  By doing this the scores they had found layered in meaning and went further than just the initial actions presented.  By working at the same time they also borrowed from each other’s actions and heated up props and spaces the in the room. 

I was surprised how fruitful this work was so quickly.  It felt like we’d tapped into something in the air.  Bill and Zoë used some found props and the level of invention was very high and the playfulness was quite subversive, opening all kinds of opportunities for further experimentation.  The theme of celebrity became a loaded one, as they played quite openly with presenting a celebrity persona, and then undercutting that by taking it further.  It seemed to me that the work was looking at the cracks in the mask of celebrity culture.  As Julia said “we seem to either adore them or satirise them, they are the gods of now.”

The performers didn’t say “reaction” or “response” during the improvs as we have done before and Julia felt that we should definitely bring that back next time as it brings a heightened awareness of yourself within the action and moves the perspective around.  It will be interesting to see in the next lab how far this can go.

I include below some of my written responses to the work shown.  The next lab will be at the end of June

One up me/special guest

Breasts echo down the tube

What have I sacrificed to be here?

Good evening London

Invasion of the inflatable mummers,

Your money or my life?

I’ll have nightmares tonight.

It’s not just us its those outside

The eyes of a different kind.

Chasing racing for your attention

What would you like now?

Take me from your dreams of

Your need for affection,

Devotion, dedication: the

Holy mother wrapped in

Clotted plastic.

I’m the tumour on your

Forehead.  I’ll pray for my own

Soulessness.

Are you our special guest?

A haunting rhythm

Underscores my presence.

“She’s not going to do that”

“A treat for you”.

Wired for you (Attempted transcription from the last improv)

Hi hi hi there hi (sigh)

Hello and good evening.

Hello I said good evening.  Hi (laughs)

Hello and good evening

Hello and good evening.

Tonight we have a special treat for you all.

You can tell them all to get fucked, someone’s

Shocking, yeah see what ooo yes a treat

Yes ok for you all.

Hello I’m calling about the position

I’d I think I can entertain you

I’ve got what it takes.  Hello and good evening.

It gives me great pleasure

It gives me great pleasure

It gives me great pleasure

It gives me great pleasure

It gives me great pleasure

It gives me great pleasure

It gives me great pleasure

Well done.

Are you entertaining me?

Anyway, we did meet this Tuesday and discussed our responses to the festival, and then did some lab work.

Attendants: Julia, Lukas, Bill, Bib.

In our performative response showing of Besides, you lose your soul, the text deals with quotations from various theatre, philosophical and historical texts, and we decided that we would like to work with favourite quotations and our responses to them for the next series of labs.

Julia gave us a quote “we struggle with dream figures and our blows fall on living faces” -by Maurice Merleau -Ponty, and we each spent 5-10 minutes on creating a response to this, showed them to each other, and then chose someone else’s response to then perform as we remembered it.

This work was a lot of fun, and is not something we have done on before.  It was interesting to see each person’s very individaul response, whether it was the way they inhabited their response through their specific physical training, or the personal anecdote used or shown which was felt to respond to or express this quote.  We didn’t have long to do this work, but after creating and showing our own responses and then attempting to inhabit someone else’s it really made, for me anyway, the quote far more personal and a part of me, as it strengthed my emotional connection with it.  Although this may not have been true for everyone, by exploring what was otherwise an unknown sentiment, it certainly brought us all closer to what it might mean.  As we were working in solos, it did however mean that the presentations seemed to be more about the “dream figures” than the “living faces” section of the quote.  The work was fruitful and had further depths to probe, and it would be interesting to work on incorporating more than one person’s response in our presentation of responses to eachother and working in duos or trios etc..

We will continue this work next week for a full session, and Bib and Lukas will be emailing quotes to the group for us to then think about over the week and then create responses to in our next session.

In attendance: Julia, Zoe, Lukas, Rachel, Bill.

At the beginning of the year we were carrying on our work with Reaction/Response and it was fascinating to see how far the work had come.  Looking at ideas of reaction and response in relation to representation and presentation, the evening was spent initially asking the performers to create a presentation and a representation of either something sacred or secular, sacred/secular or secular/sacred.  Once this was done, and each shown to the group, one performer then did their pieces again and the other performers, Julia and I, were to react and respond to what was happening, while the sole goal of the performer showing their work was to get to the end of their showing.  This process was used with Bill’s pieces and then Rachel’s pieces.

By having to announce whether you are reacting or responding to the moment, every action and comment that you make suddenly comes into question and the presence of the room shifts in awareness level, even if you are the performer showing your piece and react to something someone else has done, you have to announce it.  In this way the moment is constantly shifting and everything is being reviewed almost as it happens.

An interesting element that was brought in was repetition.  You could react, respond or repeat either your actions or words spoken, and this somehow freed the performers up to take more chances.  The repetition somehow deepens the gesture or word that is repeated, gives it more weight and means you pay attention to the echo, and to it.  It also allows the process to flow a little more and it added a sense of play with yourself and the other performers. 

As we had all been shown the pieces first before the reacting and responding occurred, we were able to play more, and the verbs such as supporting, disrupting, and witnessing were brought out, although disrupting was maybe the knee jerk reaction.   In order for the work to evolve, Julia felt that we needed to get to a rhythm where responding becomes the more popular choice as this gives a more of an open channel for the work to grow.  There is definitely so much more discovery to be made to the work, and it would be interesting when presenting this work in a lab showing to see if the audience would join in with announcing their reactions and responses as Julia and I do.  Through doing this I felt that we are once again working with that grid level of awareness, and investigating our own responses to situations which means that the work becomes much broader as it has the possibility to investigate on the audience’s own reactions and responses to what they are shown, and for us to then filter this into the work in a very real way.

We spent this lab as we usually do after a showing, discussing the previous performance. 

One of the biggest impacts on the performance was the fact that the usual divide between audience and performers was non-existent.  Most of our previous performances have occurred at paying venues where the audience is seated.  As we were in a gallery where the audience stood throughout the show, everything became or could be seen as a performance as everything was being watched.  This included all Apocryphal members, the visual artists and the audience themselves.  

In this setting, individual performers could be surrounded by audience, working on a very intimate level, as one of our performers Melina said, “the audience was touchable”.  So called “mini” performances sprung up as well as bigger moments of action amongst the audience, so rhythmically the show worked in a different way feeding off of more immediate energy.  Our showings usually rely on each audience member having their own experience of what or whom they choose to focus their attention on.  Melina suggested that in this case they became 360 degree spectators, as even if a spectator wasn’t looking at you, they may be standing behind you or leaning against you, which added a warmer relationship with them.

The big question hanging over our discussion was one of expectation.  The visual art world is very different from the theatre one and performance has an array of definitions in both realms.  We were aware of this and were excited by the prospective conflict when we became involved in the project, but we hadn’t necessarily accounted for the weight of our own expectations and reactions.  One of our missions as Apocryphal is to “undermine the reality grid of right now”.  This includes battling with our own individual reality grids as well as our performance personas and working where we may not know the outcome of what we are doing.  If the work wasn’t dangerous the experiments wouldn’t be as fruitful, and the question of rules of the room and permissions came up for everyone from “can I hug an audience member?” to “can I eat the orange that is a part of one of the art works?” 

Questions began to fly around our discussion, just as they were flying around the performance, as every decision the performers made in response to their own questions created a new set of choices for performer, artist and audience alike.  Theron suggested we play a game at the next lab where performers write down the answers they create to the questions they have about what they are allowed and not allowed to do whilst performing.  This sounded like a good idea to me, and another way to investigate that dialogue between performer and performing moment.

It also reminded me how the showings of the lab work are just as much experiments as our experiments in the lab rehearsals.   It is only by experimenting with a live audience that we can find those questions that haunt us about the work that we do, which in turn lead to the evolution of our next experiments and a lab showing.  I left the evening looking forward to our experiments next week and where we are taken next.

It was so nice to perform in a white space as we rehearse in one.  It felt like a coming home -there were theatre people there and art people and in the white space everything was illuminated, magnified and, I felt, given time to grow which isn’t always the case in a black box (theatre) convention.  Instead of asking “what is this?” I found myself asking “what will it be?” or “what will it grow into?”.

At the end of the evening we went back into the gallery and the energy had really changed.  One of the art pieces has been taken off of the wall and is now placed on the floor, the animals have been given wall space and new pieces are included.  The texts I’d written and spoken during the event are framed and hung next to the performance score.  The whole room said: something occured here, something happened and it has transformed us and, more importantly, we are not afraid to show this and share it.

The exhibition will stay like this until it closes on the 28th November.  I’ve put some photographs of the text written in the performance which is now on sale in the gallery in my album.

We have been invited by the artists to respond to their work in performance; the artists will then respond by changing the exhibit, a process that is usually kept secret, so that Apocryphal’s aesthetic of putting the ‘off-stage’ on-stage will be enacted in a whole new context.  We are very excited to be part of this experiment playing with the boundaries of visual art and performance, but without sacrificing the uniqueness of both.  We hope you can join us for this event.