Progress

‘It is a cliché that most clichés are true. But then like most clichés, that cliché is untrue’ – Stephen Fry

Shannon Turnbull

Here are a selection of quotes I will be referring to in my narrative and that will also feature on the glass panels on the ‘bridge of life’. Some are famous, others well known and do not possess an author, some I have made up myself.

  • Don’t cry because its over, smile because it happened – Dr Seuss
  • You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough – Mae West.
  • Today you are you, that is truer than true. There is no one alive that is youer than you – Dr Seuss
  • Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep balance, you must keep moving – Albert Einstein.
  • Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself – George Bernard Shaw.
  • Life every day as if it’s your last.
  • Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass, it’s about learning to dance in the rain.
  • Never a failure, always a lesson
  • Life is to be enjoyed, not endured – Gordon B Hinckley.
  • But better to get hurt by the truth, than comforted with a lie – Khaled Hosseini.
  • Everything works out okay in the end, of it’s not okay than it’s not the end.
  • When life gives you lemons, drink tequila.
  • Where there is love, there is life – Mahatma Gandhi.
  • When life gives you a hundred reasons to cry, show life you have a thousand reasons to smile.
  • There is always hope.
  • Death ends a life, not a relationship – Mitch Albom.
  • Keep going and never give up.
  • Life is what you make it.
  • Dance like no one is watching, love like you’ve never been hurt. Sing like there’s nobody listening and live like it’s heaven on earth – William W Purkey.
  • In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: ‘It goes on’ – Robert Frost
  • Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making plans – Allen Saunders.
  • Reality continues to ruin my life – Bill Waterson.
  • Just when you think it can’t get any worse, it can. And just when you think it can’t get any better, it can – Nicholas Sparks.
  • You cannot find peace by avoiding life – Virginia Woolf.
  • A life spent making mistakes is not only more honourable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing – George Bernard Shaw.
  • I don’t know the question but sex is the answer – Woody Allen.
  • Things change and friends leave. Life doesn’t stop for anybody – Stephen Chbosky. 
  • The most important thing is to enjoy your life, to be happy, it’s all that matters – Audrey Hepburn.
  • The flower that blooms in adversity is the rarest and most beautiful of all – Walt Disney.
  • Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards – Soren Kierkegaard.
  • Don’t part with your illusions. When they are gone, you may still exist, but you have ceased to live – Mark Twain.
  • Don’t be afraid of death; be afraid of an unlived life. You don’t have to live forever, you just have to live – Natalie Babbit.
  • When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life – John  Lennon.
  • The more I see, the less I know for sure – John Lennon
  • Backstabbers are only good, when you’ve got your back turned – Eminem.
  • Why didn’t I learn to treat everything like it was the last time. My greatest regret was how much I believed in the future – Jonathan Foer.
  • A learning experience is one of those things that says, ‘You know that thing you just did? Don’t do that – Douglas Adams.
  • People come, people go – they’ll drift in and out of your life, almost like characters in a favorite book. When you finally close the cover, the characters have told their story and you start up again with another book, complete with new characters and adventures. Then you find yourself focusing on the new ones, not the ones from the past – Nicholas Sparks.
  • It sounds cliché but success is your friends, your family, what you do and if you are happy when you wake up.
  • Life will throw many hurdles. Just learn to jump and run.
  • Forever isn’t long enough for what we have.
  • School will always be the best days of your life.
  • One life. Live it.
  • Live the life you love. Love the life you live.
  • Happiness is knowing who you are and being content with any flaws.
  • A confident girl is a happy girl.
  • Happiness comes from within, not the make-up you wear, the clothes you buy, the people you desire to be like. Happiness comes from the heart you own.
  • Happiness doesn’t cost a thing.
  • Money doesn’t grow on trees.
  • It doesn’t matter who hurt you or broke you down, what matters is who made you smile again.
  • Don’t change to make someone love you, be yourself and let the right one fall for you.
  • It is what it is…it was what is was.
  • Just because something good ends doesn’t mean something better won’t begin.
  • Time decides who you meet in life, your heart decides who you want in you life and your behaviour decides who stays in your life.
  • The past is the past. There’s a reason why some people didn’t make it to your future.
  • If you don’t accept me at my worse, then you sure as hell don’t deserve me at my best – Marilyn Monroe.
  • Keep your head up high gorgeous, some people would kill to see you fall.
  • Keep calm and carry on.
  • Sometimes we become so focused on the finish line, that we fail to find joy in the journey – Dieter F. Uchtdorf.
  • Pretending to be happy when you’re in pain is just an example of how strong you are as a person.
  • Crying doesn’t mean you are weak, it just means you’ve put up with the pain for too long.

‘First find a subject that you are passionate about’ is still the best piece of advice for any would be solo performer’ – Gareth Armstrong.

Shannon Turnbull

The sticks and stones of a performance.

I would be lying if I said that Solo Performance isn’t challenging. I would be lying if I said I hadn’t struggled to conceive and find various ways of executing an idea. But I would also be lying if I said that I hadn’t learnt anything, hadn’t felt it exhilarating to push myself and hadn’t enjoyed how ambiguous ‘performance art’ really is.

Nothing is 100% set in stone just yet but here are some details about my upcoming performance.

Name of performance: The little girl with her red balloons (there is always hope)

Duration of performance: Between 8-10 minutes.

Location of performance: On the University campus bridge between Engine Shed and The Library

Stimulus and style of performance: Banksy’s street art of the little girl and her red balloon. Autobiographical style with general references.

 

Details/what is happening within the performance:

Over the next few days I will be plastering this Banksy  image around Uni campus. I want to do this because it may subtly stay in people’s conscious and maybe reminded of it if they see me performing on the bridge next week. They may make the connection between ‘those’ pictures they had been seeing on their way to lectures, with this real life ‘little girl and her red balloons’. By making the image resound in people’s heads who are not necessarily coming to watch my performance is something I find interesting. When I see powerful images, I think about them for a while and then they leave. It’s the way life works. You have something and then in time, it leaves. Maybe in a way, I want to recreate a similar reception to the image Banksy did when he first started graffiting it around Bristol.

The performance will start with my audience on the bridge facing towards the LPAC. The bridge is site specific in the way that it is seen as ‘a bridge of life’.. letting go of something only to start another journey across the bridge. The bridge will (hopefully, if I get permission from the SU) be covered in clique life quotes that some people seem to live their lives by. The juxtaposed reality from the dream many people live and the fact that it is the hard emotional trauma’s in life that make you grow as a person and not the life quotes that help you ‘get by’. I will be based in the LPAC with 30 red balloons. These balloons will represent emotions/memories/experiences/myself as a performer and as Shannon.. throughout the performance I will be letting these go in various ways, for different reasons.

As I run to the bridge, I turn when confronted by my audience and face the LPAC. To me, this building has given me laughs, confidence, potential, stress, depression, emotional anxiety and I want to show it what I am now, show what it has done to me, for good and for worse. Shouting at the building if it were a person, purging my emotions not just as Shannon Turnbull but as a typical Drama student in LSPA, a typical student of Lincoln, a typical student at university. I will then let some balloons go, I am unsure of how just yet but I feel that raw emotion will take over and influence what I will do next.

After facing that side of my life, I will take the audience to the other side of the bridge.. the side of the bridge that looks down into the water. I will leave them there and go round the barriers to just sit on the side, staring at the water. Staring at everything that could have been. I will still have the balloons and I feel that this position of leaving the audience and being solitary overlooking deep water contemplating if life would be the same if you were alive or not is powerful and quite challenging? I will draw upon personal experiences but I will also make the conscious effort to not make it a resounding project about me, myself and I. It will generalise and I will ask rhetorical questions to the audience. This may make them feel sympathy for me, this may make them feel uncomfortable as it will remind them of a part of their life they want to forget or it may not affect them at all. This shows that not everyone is the same and that many things can affect different people, in extremely different ways. There will be some references to my own family and my own experiences that I don’t want to push onto other people to believe. This are my views, no one else’s.

I will then turn and face the side of the bridge that holds the striking picture of the cathedral. Here I will recount happy memories of life, constantly referencing quotes appropriate for each story. This is where I will be graduating. This is where I will leave a little part of my heart in Lincoln. This is where life begins. Again, I will expose personal memories and use this as a main narrative however inside-jokes will not dominate as I would like my audience to be active not necessarily passive.

I am still unsure on how to end this piece but I feel my emotion will carry me to this point. This doesn’t mean I will improvise but a lot of my stories and intentions are built up on my emotion and as pointed out in previous blog posts, my mood always dictates what I will end up doing. However I will end on this quote, ‘there is always hope’ – even though I will have been using these life quotations and dismissing them throughout my narrative, I will end on one. Maybe they do help people get through, maybe they have to be said by someone who truly knows what its like to lose something accidentally and unintentionally.. or by someone who has gained something. By  letting all of your personal balloons go, gaining a sense of identity and clarity you are left with one little balloon, the balloon signifying who you are now and what you want to become.

 

Performance styles.

Shannon Turnbull

Now that I had my stimulus material for a performance, the hard graft was about to start. I needed to come up with a performance that would express my personality, my experiences and my feelings as well as performing a piece applicable to the audience themselves.

Looking at different practitioners helped in my understanding of how Solo Performance can vary. Some performers were autobiographical, some expressed their material through music and song, others were using the human body to convey their stories.

I researched into Spalding Gray and his production of Swimming to Cambodia. This performance would be entirely made up of Gray’s own personal experiences when travelling in Cambodia communicated via a lengthy, stimulating monologue. “It might be asserted that in some cases the monologue form is ‘essential’ story-telling, a stripping away of dramatic illusion” (Wallace 1999, p.6). Having the ability to perform what is in essence and looks like  a ‘stream of consciousness’ is something I wanted to explore, however my life experiences are interesting enough to captivate audiences attentions for a lengthy period of time. It wasn’t about the stories I guess, it was the way in which I could embody and illustrate them that would be entertaining. Spalding Gray “wanted to explore ‘the other inside of [himself], the constant witness, the constant consciousness” (Terry 2005, p.3), the weariness of himself and his actions through trying to capture a ‘perfect moment’ was the leading through-line to his performance. Seen as a confessional performance style, Solo Performance enables whatever may be happening privately in your life to become public and of knowledge. However Gray had the capability to focus his audience on the rhythm of his prose, he didn’t need an extreme set, just a desk, a book and his voice.

Solo Performance to me, captures two degrees of a person. The performing body; there to entertain as a object of gratification but also as a personal body; the way in which personal stories are used and how they have an individual way of telling them. Gray comments that he “begins to wonder if in the act of confessing his ‘real’ self, he is not subjecting the ‘real’ to regulation by the expectations of the audience” (cited in Terry 2005, p.53). There is an integral step to Solo Performance that invites an exaggerated truth. However whatever exaggerations Gray might put into his stories they are also based on essential truths about him.

My performance will ultimately be a monologue but I would to like to refrain from Spalding’s position. I will incorporate movement and try to embody/react to my stories and the emotions that come with them.

Laurie Anderson was an experimental artist that explored different technological ways to present her work. Through song, lyrics, rhythm, tone, visual projections, her work was conveyed artistically and interestingly. Although her work does not convey autobiographical stories from the outset, her preferred medium of technology infuses her stories.

 

 

WORKS CITED:

Anderson, Laurie (1981) O Superman, Online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VIqA3i2zQw (accessed 29th April 2013).

Gray, Spalding (1985) Swimming to Cambodia – Part 1, Online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCGmra0eFQk (accessed 29th April 2013).

Terry, David Price (2005) ‘Spalding Gray and the Slippery Slope of Confessional Performance’, A Master Thesis, USA: The Department of Communication Studies, Louisiana State University.

Wallace, Clare (1999) Monologue Theatre, Solo Performance and Self as Spectacle, Online: http://litteraria.ff.cuni.cz/books/extracts/monologues_intro.pdf (accessed 29th April 2013).

 

Back to the drawing board!

Shannon Turnbull

Unfortunately after discussing my ideas with the module co-ordinator, I have now been sent back to the drawing board as my ideas were not sustainable. I am at a lost cause and feel like I have nothing to show for all the hard work I have done. However after discussions around why my performance wouldn’t work, I can understand some practical issues raised. Why would an audience want to come and observe my life? It is a good autobiographical performance however I now feel I would like to pursue something non-autobiographical.. the performance aspect of my original idea would be difficult to produce as the main body of the performance would be the exhibition. This would also differentiate myself from the rest of the group in wanting to do something objective. I feel that the problem with Solo Performance is the want for it to be original, unqiue and in some ways revolutionary. This is where I feel I am restricting myself, I need to acknowledge that my performance might be simple yet very powerful.

I still have ideas surrounding the nostalgia of the 90’s and reactions to emotive music but I’m not sure as of yet what my Solo Performance will consist of. Nevertheless, this has taught me that not ‘anything’ and ‘everything’ can constitute Solo Performance and that with every bit of rough, SHOULD come a ton of smooth.

‘We have all the better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be’ – Jane Austen

Shannon Turnbull

‘The Archive of My Life’

I have summarised my ideas and noted my intentions for both myself and audience and have concluded a feasible and emotive performance. Drawing on my ‘up and down’ persona I will delve into my life and experiences prompted by home videos and specific objects.

The performance will start as soon as people walk into the studio, they will be asked to walk around ‘the exhibition of my life’ – there will be objects ranging from clothes, videos, baby photo’s, teddies, phones, medals etc that I have acquired in my life, all of whom mean something to me. There will be place cards next to the items stating WHAT IT IS, WHEN DID I USE/MAKE/CONDUCT THIS AND WHY IT IS SENTIMENTAL TO ME? Whilst the audience is walking around being informed of those parts of my life, a silent home video from when I was younger will play in the background on a projection. The spectators will watch this but not be able to hear the audio, they will think nothing of it and continue to look around the exhibition. I will be placed in darkness surrounded by barriers in the middle of the floor. I wanted to use physical props to create a sense of claustrophobia, people will look but as I will be motionless their attention will be drawn to other aspects in the studio.

I would then like a blackout as people are walking round and then the home video to start playing with sound. They will be drawn to that and watch the repeat but with audio. When that has finished, I want a spotlight shone onto myself surrounded by these barriers, starting my monologue with “Do you ever feel like you’re life is an exhibition?” – a scripted/improvised monologue will then follow. I am going to perform partially improvised because that captures the crux of my performance. As previously explained, I have a very up and down personality and because that mood changes very quickly and becomes controlling, myself and Martin have agreed that I will perform how I want and what I feel like on that day.

This isn’t set in stone as of yet but I would then like to choose 3 or more objects in that exhibition to interact with and comprise a short story about. I am still unsure as to what I want the audience to feel and to what outcome I want to achieve, however exhibiting my life including the bad parts is a big step for a Solo Performance and hopefully my monologue with be both emotional, exhilarating and humorous.