Category Archives: Initial Experiments

The food experiments

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After it was decided we would be looking into the feeder fetish, we decided to experiment with handing over control and feeding each other. On 7th November 2013 we all bought foods we like and then gave them over to our feeder. One by one we took it in turns to be fed and then become the feeder ourselves. We wanted to all experience the act of giving and receiving the foods we would usually eat ourselves for pleasure. The experience was very odd as the act of feeding is usually a personal act. When I gave up control and Lizzy took the role of feeding me it was very odd. I was fed crisps and cheese-strings.

Feeding/Fed

Giving up control: Taken by Lauren Watson 7 /11/13

Being fed is not an experience I am used to in my every day life, so by giving the personal act of feeding to another was something new. This was the same for the rest of the group and made us think more about those whose fetish involves the act of feeding another/being fed as part a pleasurable experience of everyday life.

As part of our work in progress on 22nd November we decided to use it to our advantage and used it to help us finalise some areas of the performance we were uncertain of. These included the costumes we would wear and the positioning of us and the audience. We set up three chairs for our gainers, decided by the drawing of straws, with a table downstage holding the food and the audience in a thrust style.

IMG_3221

Work in progress: Taken by Kirsty Taylor 22/11/13

Work in progress gainers: Taken by Kirsty Taylor 22/11/13

As we were unsure as to what we should wear we all wore different outfits ranging from underwear to gym wear. We drew straws to decide who would taken on the role of either feeder or gainer. I chose a long straw and so became a feeder. The feeders fed each of the gainers in turn for fifteen minutes and we then received feedback. From this we were able to decide which outfits were received the best and also helped formulate new idea’s regarding audience. We did not expect such wide and interesting reactions from the audience and so we realised that by allowing the audience to see each other as well as the performance it would add to the atmosphere of the piece. It also made us aware of how this piece could also spark thoughts in the audience of their own personal relationship with food and their opinion of how much/little is ‘normal’ to consume.

Man vs Food

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Food is the main energy supply for growth, movement and repairing the body. From birth, living things start growing, gaining weight and changing.  (BBC, 2013)

But what happens when we challenge our bodies into eating large quantities of food or even the food that our bodies/taste-buds disagree with? This experiment is not only physically demanding its experimenting with the concept of ‘mind over matter’. Pushing our bodies until we physically cannot eat anymore, this may be shown through gagging, being sick or to the point where we cannot physically eat anymore.

Our initial was to experiment with was foods we didn’t like. This involved foods such as sardines, soup, tomatoes, bananas (these things were things which each individual brought to the experiment)  We started with putting foods out on a table, non of the foods weren’t particularly presented in the way you would usually eat them, this made me question the effect in which the presentation of the food effects us individually.  A item of food I brought to the experimental was soup which was in a tin this was then poured into a bowl in front of us and the sound which it made being poured in a bowl, was quite deafening, which  heightened the effect of the experimental  making it an intimate experience for myself. The use of hearing the food, crunching, slopping, popping, chewing draws people to watch and engage with that particular food, which is something we are looking at to explore in our future experimental.

Once we had established the different types of food, all of us waited nervously awaiting to see if we would get the food which we didn’t like. This particular part of the experimental was challenging as we were anticipating what was to come, not knowing the unknown was a big part of this experimental. A member of third year drama assisted us in our experimental, who made the decision to what each of us should eat, and this was to experiment with the audience and our interaction with one another. The use of having assistance allowed us to not have any influence in picking foods that people like or dislike.  The highlight of this experimental for all of us was to challenge our bodies to eat sardines. This personally was very challenging as I was nearly sick, this concept of pushing my body to eat something that I do not enjoy and necessary created a response. Although the concept of this experimental was not to be sick, but to push ourselves the awfulness of this experimental creates impact when something bad is happening. Most people associate food as pleasure, something we enjoy doing and when someone is not enjoying or reacting in a way that doesn’t seem the ‘norm’ people tend to be interested and engage with the content, how much is too much?

Work Cited

-BBC – Learning Zone Class Clips – Why do we need to eat? – Science Video. 2013. BBC – Learning Zone Class Clips – Why do we need to eat? – Science Video. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/learningzone/clips/why-do-we-need-to-eat/2288.html. [Accessed 22 October 2013].

Completing a task.

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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:

1383817_10152038481832915_667238247_n Eating

(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.

How do we define performance?

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In contemporary theatre we often here the question ‘what constitutes a performance?’ and ‘how must we define it?’

Erving Goffman, cited in Performance Studies: an Introduction, defines performance as “all the activity of a given participant on a given occasion which serves to influence in any way of the other participants” (Schechner 2002, p. 29). A performance can be a variety of things, such as playing a sport, putting on a show, simply carrying out a daily routine or ritual, and even having sex can be categorised as a performance. It is essentially something you aim to succeed in, an action to be carried out in front of an audience. It may be durational or last for only a short period of time. Many performance theorists argue that everyday life is performance as “at present, there is hardly any human activity that is not a performance for someone somewhere” (Schechner 2002, p. 40), whether it may be someone getting dressed or making their journey to work. These everyday routines can be classed as ‘restored behaviour’ because they are actions which will have being repeated more than once during your life time, as a result performances that consist of actions within a daily routine may be more interesting to an audience as they recognise them as their everyday life .  What is interesting is that though all of it is considered artistic what may be performance to one person could perhaps not be thought as performance to another.

In relation to this, in class we undertook an experiment that when it was first described to us what we were to take part in, generally most of us did not think it could be branded as performance. We first talked about Marina Abramovic’s performance The Artist is Present, where every day for three months, she sat for seven and a half hours on a chair, staring into the eyes of audience members who sat opposite her staring back. Below is a video of this performance:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OS0Tg0IjCp4#t=62

(MiticoMazz 2012)

Throughout the process she was present and completely focused on the person sat opposite her. Being so motionless made her as a performer more vulnerable to the audience, there was no barrier between them, just herself.  For Abramovic it was a strong form of communication, it was able to bring up emotions that might not have been unexplored or supressed in the audience members and also Abramovic herself. To investigate this theory, we undertook an experiment that closely resembled her performance. We were told to take a chair and sit opposite someone, creating two rows in the middle of the room. We were then told that for 10 minutes we had to stare back at the person opposite us, emotionless. Those 10 minutes, for me personally, dragged for what appeared to be a very long time. I had cleared my mind of anything so I was completely present and I just stared back completely still. Once the time was up we were told to stay where we were, to everyone’s dismay, and that this experiment was going to last for another hour and a half. No time was given to absorb the shock; instead we had to focus back on the person opposite us. If those first 10 minutes felt like hours, the next hour and a half felt like a life time. Being able to completely focus yourself on one person for a short amount of time was not too hard, but as the time goes on your mind starts to wander, there appears to be a limit of how long you can keep it blank. You start to run things through your head such as shopping lists or something that you are worried about. The person sat opposite me was very successful in this experiment, they did not move or fidget once, and because of such deep concentration there became a very powerful atmosphere between us. I on the other hand found it very difficult, focusing so hard caused my eyes to tear up and strain. It became physically painful and tiring to keep them open. On a few occasions I felt myself fall to sleep as I just couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer.

For me, this may not have worked as well as Marina Abramovic’s because there were many of us in the same room undertaking the same experiment. Or maybe it was because we hadn’t prepared ourselves for something so intense. What at first glance appeared to be such a simple and motionless task was actually unbelievably physically and emotionally challenging. Such results will come in use when thinking about what other tasks we could experiment with.

Works cited

MiticoMazz (2012) Marina Abramovic e Ulay – MoMA 2010 [Online Video] Available from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OS0Tg0IjCp4#t=62 [Accessed 9 November 2013]

Schechner, R (2002) Performance Studies: an Introduction (2nd Ed.), London and New York: Routledge

 

Tasks.

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Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s article on Playing to the Senses: Food as a Performance Medium discusses the use of food as a performative medium and the various ways in which food has been used as art. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett states that

“to perform is to do, to execute, to carry out to completion, to discharge a duty–in other words, all that governs the production, presentation, and disposal of food and their staging. To perform in this sense is to make food, to serve food. It is about materials, tools, techniques, procedures, actions. It is about getting something done.” (Gough, 2012, p. 1)

This definition rings true in our performance on a number of levels. Firstly the “task” of our performance is for the eaters/gainers to complete the task of eating as much food as they can in a given amount of time. The idea of fulfilling a task in our performance was one that our group decided to focus on from very early on in the devising process, having been influence by artists such as Melati Suryodarmo, who’s performance Exergie- Butter Dance might be considered an extreme example of how the act of completing a set task with rules or time restrictions can be a very entertaining spectacle.

(Carey Goodman, 2012)

In watching this performance I found myself going through stages of reaction. First I laughed, because the concept of dancing on butter was strange to me and entertaining to watch. Yet as she started to fall I became uncomfortable. I did not like to see her inflict pain on herself, yet I was mesmerised by the movement and music to the point where I could not look away. It struck me that in completing her set task she was also pushing herself physically to the point of pain but also mentally; knowing that in completing this task you are going to fall and hurt yourself multiple times when you could just as easily walk away would take will power.

While I do not think that the butter in Exergie-Butter Dance influenced our choice to use food in our performance, our aims to push the body to complete a task soon lead us to eating as a challenge.

While Abramovic and Mary Coble have created art using the human body as a canvas, artists such as Fiona Gregore in her piece Water # 1: Decent (2011) create their pieces by pushing their body’s physical and mental endurance without mutilating or putting their bodies in obvious pain or danger. Pushing yourself mentally is a challenge that others can see if you allow them to, but it can be purely internal and private. So what would happen if we pushed our internal body?
We decided to start with the taste buds.
In our original ideas on creating tasks with food we looked into forcing ourselves to eat food we didn’t like. I for example cannot stomach bananas, even the smell makes me feel ill, and so in this experiment I had to force myself to eat one. As you can see below my feelings towards the food had not changed.

Eating

Photo by Andrew Tinley, 2013

 

The experiment wasn’t pleasant for anyone, including our voluteer audience. But it was fascianting. One of the most disturbing things about this experiment was how interesting it was to see each others reactions to the food that they were eating. The discusted facial expressions and noises of protest coupled with a determination that each of us should complete our task made for a mesmerising experience.

 

Word Count

Gough, R (2012) Playing to the Senses: Food as a Performance Medium. Performance Reasearch. On Cooking, 4, 1.

Carey Goodman (2012) Melati Suryodarmo – Butterdance. [online video]. Available from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73MJxB7tCkk [Accessed 1 Novemeber 20213].