An aspect of contemporary experimental performance that we found particularly interesting is carrying out a task, predominantly impossible tasks. In Melati Suryodarmo’s ‘Exergie Butter Dance’, which is attached below, she dances for twenty minutes in high heels and a black tight dress on top of a platform made out of butter bars.
(Kunstbanken Hedmark Kunstenter 2013)
Suryodarmo stands on the butter and dances to the music of Indonesian drums. She dances and falls frequently, hitting the floor hard, when on the verge of standing back up she slips and falls back in the butter. When the time was up, she stood up and instead of carrying on dancing she stepped off the platform. Here she is simply performing and completing a task in front of an audience. Even though she does not possess a dancer physique she still pushes her body, with great confidence, in attempting such an impossible task. The idea of having a task and straightforwardly performing it was something we found very intriguing.
Such work influenced our own performance piece, where we first experimented with the task of putting jigsaws together. We started off with a 1000 piece jigsaw so we could all work together in the challenge to complete it. Something which we first imagined to be fairly easy turned out to be practically impossible. We gave ourselves two hours to complete the task, and in that time span not even half of the jigsaw was put together. Each of us would get frustrated when we could not find pieces to fit together, it took some people a good ten minutes before they found two pieces that fit. With this initial performance idea, we wanted to have our hands tied together in front of us, so it would hinder us and hold back complete use of our hands. The audience would see us challenging ourselves in such a simple task. However what may have looked simple actually turned out to be too impossible for us to think about carry on experimenting with, we got too aggravated with the puzzle and each other when we had the full ability of our hands never mind if we had them tied together.
Since taking part in the earlier experimental performance in class mentioned in a previous blog post, Marina Abramović has been a great influence in our early work; a vast amount of her performances were concerned with exploring the limits of the human body. Specifically her own. In an article on Abramović, Maureen Turim states that “She methodically sets out to perform an act that has clear parameters and goals” (2003, p. 105), Abramović always sets out to do a task and knows what she is aiming for in the performance. We also wanted our performance to have these ‘clear parameters’. Another experiment was carried out in our group. Each of us was interested in taste buds and the different foods which we liked and disliked. This was something we could play around with, what was appealing was that there were certain foods which some of us could not stomach or even think about eating. The challenge here is what would happen if we were made to eat those certain items of food? We wanted to push our bodies physically, and if that meant we would vomit then that would be one of the consequences. In experimenting with this we each brought an item of food which we liked and one which we did not, and they were all put on a table. We knew what each other did not like so we brought a small audience in who had completely no idea. They were to choose an item and give it to a person of their choice to eat it. We each received a fork full of sardines, something which none of us could stomach. Because we were given it, we had no choice but to eat it, causing gagging, eyes watering and even hyperventilation when it came to my turn. When we got given food which we in fact did like such as marshmallows and apples, our reactions were completely different as it was easy to eat unlike the sardines which I struggled to even put them in my mouth. The small audience found our different reactions fascinating to watch, and also the great power they felt in choosing the food. In exploring this idea, we wondered what would happen if you gave people food that they did like but in a large quantity, would our reactions be different and would the food become too sickly to stomach? This is something we aim to carry on exploring in future experiments.
Below are the photos of the two experiments we took part in:
(Taken by Kirsty Jakins: 29.10.13) (Taken by Lauren Watson: 6:11.13)
Work Cited
Kunstbanken Hedmark Kunstenter (2013) Melati Suryodarno “Exergie – Butter Dance” [Online Video] Available from http://vimeo.com/46277791 [Accessed 9 November 2013]
Turim, M. (2003) Marina Abramović’s Performance: Stresses on the Body and Psyche in Installation Art, Camera Obscura, 18 (54) 98-117.