EMMA: New Ground

Content

I'm acting as secretary and making a quick list of the content/thematic ideas on which it feels like we have been focusing our work. It feels like we are narrowing in on these from Norah's original list on the wiki after our brainstorming session in Week 3.

Big Idea: Watching and being watched
Small Ideas:
-Blurring the line between Private and Public Spaces
-Layers of Surveillance
-Acknowledging, Assuming, Subverting, Inverting the power of the gaze
-Disciplinary Power of the Gaze
-Space/architecture and surveillance being used together as mechanisms of organization and control of humans
-Body as object of the gaze, object of surveillance, object of power, object of control


These are HUGE topics, but if we're viewing this piece as a collage of associated content I think we're OK layering specific references/allusions to each of them one on top of the other. Specificity, as I'm finding more and more, is the key. It's not about "body as object" but about Ashley's body captured with ease by the grainy green gaze of the night shot camera when she stands in stillness and the great difficulty of framing her in the shot when she darts quickly from one point of the caged space to another. Letting content suggest, but not dictate, the form of our material feels to me a potentially powerful approach.

We're clearly interested in using the audience as unknowing members of the "performance" by virtue of their specific location in the performance space. The audience's becoming aware of their central role in the piece is the pivotal moment, the "aha," the climax. After this turning point, the audience becomes aware and views the space and the performance differently: Am I being watched? When am I being watched? Who is watching? Why? Do we want to do something with this awareness? Is there another level of engagement that the audience will enter into - is it here that they "man the cameras," taking a more active role in the manipulation of the gaze? I'm not sure exactly what that next step would be - but it sounds like this is what we're talking about occuring in the Runway Space. If the audience has just gone through their own "hall of mirrors" (oooo, I love that!) where they see themselves at various points throughout the performance - and if they have just "gotten" the mystery of the space and the piece - they should be presented with the opportunity to do something with this knowledge in the final moments of the performance experience.

Any thoughts?

posted by Annie @ 4:57 PM