When I presented the installation I had created in the toilet cubicles I realised a flaw that existed and that was the size of the space, with the audience continuously funnelling in and getting in the way of one another the issue arose that too many people were trying to get in one tiny space. As I explored this difficulty I came to the realisation that people would have to enter the space one at a time, this led to me to doing research into the idea of one to one performance “One to One performance… affords the spectator to immerse themselves in the performance framework set out by the practitioner. This can be a seductive / scary / liberating / boring / intimate prospect and an even more intensive experience.” (Zerihan et al, 2009) I wanted the audience to appreciate the grandstand in its full glory and with my begun research one to one began to become the ideal option. However, I didn’t want this performance to become something I act in, I want it to become something more and so I begun to look at types of site performance that could be fused with one to one performance and the concept of live art stood out “Performance, in fact, is now where it’s at; it’s hard to think of much recent art that isn’t, at some level, performative.” (Searle, 2012) Art and performance aren’t just a fusion, they are in fact one of the same thing and so through this I began to understand the piece I wished to create.

Further research into one to one performance helped me to understand what I wanted to undertake to a greater extent “One to One performance foregrounds subjective personal narratives that define – and seek to redefine – who we are, what we believe and how we act and re-act.” (Zerihan, 2006) This lead me to another realisation that it was enough to just display pictures but to give voice, my own voice and narrative I needed to research and create for the intimacy of this performance. Zerihan in fact proved to be an ideal practitioner when studying then concept of one to one performance and so I continued to read through her studies and she shed a lot of light on the topic particularly.

I researched into practitioners and there one to one performances and all featured a very intimate settings for example Pinchbeck’s, The Long and Winding Road, in which the audience member is in the car with the performer as they literally and figuratively take a journey together in a very intimate space.

Pinchbeck, M. [The Long and Winding Road at Birmingham Public] 2008 [image online] Available from: http://julianhughesphotography.blogspot.co.uk/2008/08/long-and-winding-road-michael-pinchbeck.html [Accessed on 19 March 2014].

Martina Von Holn, used one quote in her interview that particularly stuck in my head with reference to her piece Seal of Confession “What is essentially occurring is a making oneself vulnerable, the unpredictability of the audience… is an expression of that ‘disarming’ process. The negotiation of trust through taking risk lies necessarily at the heart of the encounter.” (Von Holn and Searle, 2009) I wanted to explore this, the concept that one to one performance is also about exploring your own vulnerabilities as well as the sites.

I looked back through my research and began to understand that for this performance I personally wanted to embody that decay, I wanted to represent the decay of the site through a platform that could be accessed by the performer and the audience. I watched the video I had created previously “What use to be” (Robinson, 2014) and a theme that continuously appeared was a horse, a decay in the stables the horses were kept in, a decay in the grandstand of which they would be weighed in and I realised that this needed to be incorporated into my performance.

Performances Cited:

Martina Vol Holn: Seal of Confession (2007)

Michael Pinchbeck: The Long and Winding Road (2004-2009)

References:

Robinson, A. (2014) The Art of Installation. [blog entry] 12 March. Lincoln: University of Lincoln. Available from https://sitespecific2014mpi.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/2014/03/12/the-art-of-installation [Accessed 19 March 2014].

Searle, A. (2012) How Performance Art Took Over. [online] London: The Guardian. Available from http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/jul/03/performance-art-abramovic-tate-modern [Accessed 19 March 2014].

Zerihan, R., Ashery, O., B, F., Bartram, A., Dobkin, J., Freeman, D., Howells, A., Johnson, D., Kartsaki, E., Kela, L. Louise, B. Mendes-Silva, S. O’Reilly, K., Parthipan, J., Pinchbeck, M., Rose, S., Sweeting, S., Von Holn, M. (2009) Live Art Development Agency Study Room Guide on One to One Performance. 

Zerihan, R. (2006) Intimate Inter-actions: Returning to the Body in One to One Performance. [online] Available from http://people.brunel.ac.uk/bst/vol0601/rachelzerihan/home.html [Accessed 19 March 2014].