soloperformacestaplesk

Sue Austin

Disabled performance artist. Although her work is not something I can achieve myself, it is incredible so I wish to share it on my blog. It once again shows just how amazing and beautiful wheelchairs can be. It also shows just how much you can do in one. While I won’t be diving in mine for my performance, it perhaps links into a potential section within my performance where I do martial arts. Although I am disabled I can fight and I want to, if it fits, include this into my piece as it really challenges the stereotypes that disabled people are “weak and pathetic”. Austin’s performance does a similar thing. She does something that people would have assumed to be impossible for someone in a wheelchair. My main theme for my performance is getting rid of this misconceptions about disability, and I felt that Austin’s work really does that.

 

Alice Sheppard

Disabled dancer, solo performer and choreographer. Sheppard using her wheelchair to create performances that show that a wheelchair and be beautiful and to show just what she is “able” to do.

Doors:

The solo piece doors not only features Sheppard’s wheelchair but also crutches. Using dark lighting and a breathing soundscape, Sheppard creates as shape that seems almost bug-like. This piece stood out for me for the shapes Sheppard made with her crutches. The lighting is dark so that you can’t really see her face, the whole piece seems very dark and with the breathing soundscape it does kind of feel like a creature awakening. I don’t tend to use my crutches within my movement pieces however after watching this I think I will test it out and see if it would work in my own piece.

 

Trusting If/Believing When:

In this piece Sheppard moves her wheelchair in an usual way. This is something I tend to do a lot in my own pieces. Generally speaking, people tend to assume that being in a wheelchair you’re limited in how you can move when in most cases the wheelchair actually allows you the freedom to move. A wheelchair is seen as a symbol of negativity when they are actually beautiful. If wheelchairs didn’t exist I would be unable to go anywhere, I’d be completely stuck however because I have a wheelchair I can get about. This piece really highlights just how beautiful wheelchairs can be and also how much you can do with them. They can be moved about in ways you didn’t expect and this is something I will definitely be using in my own performance.

 

So, I will wait…:

This piece shows that slow movement can be really effective. The piece is slow but engaging and Sheppard allows for pauses. I think this piece shows that at times it is better to suspend the moves and allow the audience to really look at what your doing. Give them that moment to take it in. In this piece Shepard really shows how able she is. She rolls over with her wheelchair, she lifts it above her head. It amazing. One thing Sheppard’s pieces have highlighted to me is her wheelchair. She has a sports wheelchair which are lightweight and have seatbelts so there’s no risk of the wheelchair falling on her face. I do not have this type of chair which means I need to careful what moves I do and see how much my chair will take as it’s not designed to this kind of thing.

http://alicesheppard.com/solo-performances/

 

 

In one of our recent classes we discussed our first ideas for our pieces. Perhaps I didn’t explain what I wanted to do very well, which is highly likely given my disability means that I can’t always put across idea very well especially under pressure, as the feedback I received did not exactly match what I was trying to explain. The class seemed to think that want to tell some kind of sob story about how I became disabled, when that’s never what I’ve wanted to do…simply because it’s not a sob story. I realised that the class had very ablest ideas about what having a disability must be like and it was that, rather than their actual feedback, that started to give me some structuring and script ideas for my piece. Some things that the class said actually, to be perfectly honest, annoyed me and at times were offensive, though this was unintentional on their part.

I was referred to as “less-abled”.

This is not a word you use to describe disabled people! It implies that I am less than an abled person and that is not the case. I am not “less-abled”. I am DISABLED. Being disabled is an identity. It’s something that a lot of disabled people are proud of. Disabled is also the correct term to use.

Another thing that was said was that “what happen was a really horrible thing to happen to you…”

This is a very ablest point of view. I do not see my disability as something horrible because very simply it’s not. Yeah it obviously changed my life and changed the way I live but that does not make it a bad thing. Another word that got thrown around was the word “inspiring” which is a word that is not as kindly looked upon by the disabled community as abled-bodied people seem to think it is. I’m not inspiring. I’m a student. The same as everyone else in the room. I have not done anything inspiring so I do not want to be called that just because I am in a wheelchair…that does not sit well with me.

I never wanted to do a piece that was some sob story about how I went from abled-bodied to disabled, I wanted to do a piece in which I use my own story to discuss this idea of being disabled. The disabled identity. You do not become disabled the moment you gain your condition, you become disabled over time. This made me think of videos that BBC Three have been doing recently which things not to say to certain people and there’s quite a few disability related ones. These videos have helped me come up with an idea for the structure of my piece. I plan to do on the idea of things not to say to disabled people. I still want to use physical theatre so what I plan to do is to answer certain questions, like “what’s wrong with you”, using movement sequences.

Now that I’ve got this idea I now plan to work out what questions I want to answer and work out a draft script to work from.

Robert Wilson: 

„Visual artist. Known for his use of light, his investigations into the structure of a simple movement, and the classical rigor of his scenic and furniture design. His work focuses on movement and lighting to create very visual performances. While I find that his work is very interesting to watch and look at I don’t think that I’m likely to use it within my own performance.

Presentation on Wilson’s work below:

Robert Wilson

Whoopi Goldberg:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMA5Iqrnr6Q

I really liked Whoopi Goldberg’s performance style. The way she tells the story and discusses serious topics in a way that is also very funny is brilliant. She keeps the story flowing and even when she changes the subject it all links together. Unlike Swimming to Cambodia, the changes in topic are not sudden or dramatic rather the topics over lap and naturally flow together. She manages to grab the audiences attention with the way she tells the story, by changing the way in which she speaks the lines. The story goes from being funny to discussing a serious topic to going back to funny. The character Fontaine also changes up stereotypes. She is a drug addict but she also very clever and in the video below there are moments when the audience laugh at the idea of a clever drug addict. When this happens Goldberg improvises brilliantly and questions why the audience find this idea hard to believe.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewlUJsgrByI

I really liked the way in which Goldberg can discuss a serious topic in a manner that is funny and I feel like I want to try to use this idea within my own performance if possible. I feel like the way in Goldberg does add humour within a serious topic makes the serious parts stand out more. They have more effect. When Goldberg pauses and the audience have a less than a minute experience of silence, for example, makes you think about what Fontaine is actually saying. Another example is when Fontaine talks about the quote by Anne Frank and the idea that this child did, despite everything, thing that there was more good in people than bad, that moment does hit home. It makes you think and then Goldberg adds humour as to lighten the mood. I found Goldberg’s work the most engaging out of all the artist we’ve looked at so far.

Tim Miller:

Miller is a performance artist whose work explores his identity as a gay man. The thing I actually really liked about Miller’s work is that he uses his own story to talk about a bigger social issue. This is something I want to do with my own work. He has a very dramatic story telling style and he is also very physical in some of his pieces. He’s also political and talks about the issues that effect him and his community. Even though he is telling his own story, he is also telling the story of his community and I think that that is very effective and makes the performance much more interesting.  It very much starts as his story but then evolves into a much bigger topic area as he introduces his community’s struggles into the story.

Past work I want to develop further….

As said before I want to do a solo performance about becoming disabled/my disability using physical theatre. The idea to do this came from a past piece of work that I, and my group, devised. What I want to do is to use this performance and develop it into a solo piece. I also plan to perhaps use monologues and perhaps projection as well as I feel that this might be the best way to tell the story I want to tell. The thing I really loved about this past piece is that it really shows what I can do, physically and that physical theatre is a performance style that allows me to move in and out of my chair. My wheelchair is also like another performer. It has it’s own presence, it’s own energy and it’s a quite a powerful object because of it’s, generally speaking, negative connotations. Wheelchairs are generally associated  to illness and tragedy so I think by using the chair in ways it’s not designed for perhaps makes people realise that at the end of the day, it’s just a chair. The person who uses the wheelchair and the wheelchair become separate. I think the image of the empty chair also has some interesting emotion to it. There is a section in this piece where all the performers are just looking at the wheelchair and there’s this pause. This pause feels tense, for us as performers it’s because we know that the next section is the longest and most important so the others are waiting for me to start the section and for the audience they are waiting for something to happen. Waiting for someone to either move the chair or to get in it, for the owner of the chair has not been established. It may be obvious because I have walked with crutches and used the chair briefly in one of the earlier sections but I have not sat in it. I have not actually made it explicitly clear that it is my chair. So I feel that an empty wheelchair is a very dynamic imagine that I want to use, perhaps at the start of my piece. I might try experimenting with the start of the show, maybe start with the chair empty so that audiences focus is the chair to begin with not the performer. There is a lot of things that I can test and play with in terms of the wheelchair. Despite the fact that my wheelchair, in a sense, is the biggest obstacle perhaps in my everyday life, on stage it is actually freeing and interesting things to work with as there is so much that I can actually use it for.

I have also done a solo movement piece before, when I was in college and had only just become disabled. In this piece I have limited movement compared to the video above because I had not the strength or ability to move much at that time. This video is also from a rehearsal of the piece so it was not as ‘polished’ as it was in the final show.

 

So I went to see the movie The Greatest Showman…wasn’t overly impressed but it gave my some things to think about for my solo performance…

The reason why I was not a fan of the film was because it romanticised the idea of “freak shows” and it implied that the only place someone who is disabled or different can “feel at home” is in a circus, however this also made me think about my solo performance and whether I should try and relate it almost back to this freak show/ circus idea. One of the first thoughts the film gave me was whether I should maybe stage the show in the round. Circuses are set in the round so I thought, when I actually start the rehearsal process, I might experiment with staging my audience in this setting. The reason I want to test this idea is because I want to do my performance about my disability and my experience of changing from abled-bodied to disabled, and the thing that has changed the most since losing my ability to walk is the fact that I get stared at and made to feel like a “freak”. Placing the show in the round, or if not this but in somehow relating the show back to the idea of a freak show, I hope to perhaps make people a bit uncomfortable. I do want to use physical theatre for my piece so staging in the round might not be possible , however I really like the idea of somehow linking back to freak shows, even if it’s just via a monologue or through costume. I think, this is just ideas at the moment, that maybe if I try to set up the feeling of a freak show then strip it back to my story, the reality of being disabled not some sob-story or “inspiring” circus act, that might be affective. Reinforcing the idea, maybe, that I’m not some circus act rather I’m just a human being. Another thing that Greatest Showman made me realise was that only disabled audience members found the show offensive. There was a complete perspective difference from the disabled community and disabled critics to the abled-bodied critics.  Abled-bodied audience members have raved about the film and make out that its some inspiring story about a “normal” man giving some “different” people a place to express themselves without realising the truth behind it. The real life  P.T. Barnum popularized the idea of freak shows in America. Or , in more cynical terms, he helped make the dehumanization of disabled people as a form of entertainment popular. He also bought and sold slaves and people with disabilities and then showcased them in museums and circuses. Yet the movie makes out that he was some great friend to the disabled community. Again this began to give me some ideas for solo performance. This idea of dehumanization. The idea that as a disabled person I am less than human, or at least am considered that way by some. I begun to taught maybe I could do something with this idea, like perhaps telling my story and then quickly switching into a another character to talk about it from an outside put of view. The ringleader outfit caught my attention so I thought that maybe this other character could be dressed as a ringleader, to link back to the idea of freak shows.  At the moment everything is just ideas, want I now need to start doing is physically rehearsing and testing out these ideas.