Overall, I feel the performance was a great success; we strove to create an original piece that incorporated; multimedia, contemporary performance and our own personal ideas and experiences. From my findings during the interviews I gave two audience members and the feedback received from our tutors it is fair to say the hard work paid off. As a collaborative group I feel that from initially loosely discussing ideas to the final piece we grew in leaps and bounds.
There were a few contributing factors to the success of our final performance;
Firstly our location, because we were lucky enough to use such an amazing location we wanted to use it to the best of our abilities. In order to make the most of the space we decided early on that we would devise scenes in every upstairs room. We used;
-The staircase
-The V.I.P toilets
-The V.I.P room
-Dance room one
-The main room
-The Basement
Using the six spaces creating a promenade effect for the audience was a good decision. We were the only group to have performed in Tokyo, and were in fact the first people to perform a theatre production in the location too. The manager of Tokyo even said she had thoroughly enjoyed the show.
Secondly, Our ‘well executed’ use of multimedia was another contributing factor to our success. From our initial ideas we always knew that we wanted our piece to be heavily influenced by the use of multimedia, hence the course title ‘Multimedia performance’. But we had to explore what exactly multimedia performance meant to use individually.
Thirdly, our organisation throughout the rehearsal process was key. We met as a group a number of times throughout each week and all consistently posted on our group Facebook wall in order to keep on top of the events within production.
I asked one of my peers to dictate some questions to me in order to establish an effective evaluative reflection of my own contribution to the piece.
The interview went as follows;
What original ideas did you contribute to the group?
“Well firstly after we decided on our main ideas for the piece and what we were going to do during our performance we incorporated a room called the spam room and my idea was that we would have an auction in which character profiles were sold to members of the audience. The reason in which I had this idea is because I felt that anyone who is online, who creates a profile online whether it be; Twitter, Facebook, Plenty of fish any social networking site, are selling themself to anyone who visits the site, even if the elements of you are not factual, the representation is still a sale. I felt that because we were using real-life elements to portray a cyber world having an auction would depict this idea in the performance. Another idea was the use of feathers in the performance. During the start of our performance the characters drop feathers on the floor, the reason I wanted to do this is because I felt it was a great portrayal of the cyber and how it is weightless, you can’t feel it, yet it is still all around us. Sorcha’s character that is a real life portrayal uses feathers rather than water, as she has been immersed into the cyber at that point”.
How did you develop ideas within a large group?
“Obviously it was very difficult initially for everyone to express their ideas because there was such a large group of us, seven of us. The way in which I put my ideas across, was by weighing up all of the ideas, trying ideas out through the devising and improvisation process. Some of the ideas that I contributed were used in the end”.
What were your inspirations for the concept of you piece?
“The main inspirations were the social networks that are currently available within society. We felt as a collective that the intense usage of these social networks inevitably means that they will dominate society as we know it; there is no one in this society that doesn’t own a mobile phone, or uses the internet. Fifty years ago that wasn’t the case. Things are changing, new programmes are being developed. There are more people using the internet. That was our main concept really”.
How did you characterise yourself for the performance?
“My character was a recycle bin and not only did I want to show that I was an accessory in a computer system. I was also a French maid. Obviously a maid cleans up, hence recycle bin. The other girls and I created personas that we obtained depicting woman that are exposed online in a male dominated society. I was a French maid; Becca was a geisha type character. Then we have Sylvia and Christy who were computer anti-virus software. The way in which they were dressed was slightly provocative as well. In terms of characterisation, my character was quite robotic, quite an air head not very engaged, which again links back to how people act in the real-world after being en-gulfed in the cyber”.
What would you have changed about the performance?
“I feel that all of our ideas were successful, all of the concepts were acknowledged by everyone. I think if there was anything technically we would have changed it would have been the projection of our voices”.
To conclude, I feel that our original piece met the ‘Multimedia performance’ brief, there are a few changes that could be made to our piece in order to make it even better as a site-specific multi-media performance and if we were to perform again im sure we would definately put the elements into practice.