This week I went back and forth with the question and drove myself crazy but at the end I met my academic angle and she gave me the courage to finally decide on a question that my tutor gave me inspiration before on my tutorial: How can performance art be more relevant to today’s living?
Since I attached a mind map and a process snail that my course leader recommended us to do in this week’s class, and it shows the process, there is no need to review how I stuggled to find my question again. Everyone can be struggled at some point, it’s just a common thing. Other than that, I want to show my progress of being a performance artist. On Sunday, I decided to make a seek love poster as I find dating app very inefficient and I never tried campus love in my life. On Monday, I printed 27 copies of my seeking love poster and posted all over CSM and on Tuesday my friend helped my to post 6 copies at LCC. So far I got many friends taking pictures of themselves and my posters and one person from LCC messaged me. But the outcome of whether I can find a lover or not doesn’t matter that much. I just want to take the first step to be bold and do something I dare not to do and overcome or drench myself in the inner awkwardness to get used to future action of performance art. The seeking love poster is like a kindergarten towards performance art to me. On Thursday, I went to a workshop called Moving to Reflect at M103 CSM, and tried my first move of expressing my body, I made a vedio record, I know I am very far from being artistic but I am open to any judgement. Laugh at me as you can, I am brave enough to try. Laugh at me when I have my 1st piece of performance art work, laugh at me if I am successful, laugh at me if I failed. Laugh at me as hard as you can. And I will survive and be tough from it. Okay, enough for the little “poetry”, let’s move on. After that I went to see Stage 1 BA PDP Festival and saw many well-prepared performance art, this is the very first time I ever saw performance art in real life, and I was amazed. I gathered some inspiration not like directly knowing what I want to do, but opened a gate for my potential future work. After that, I came across a broken hand model at CSM swap shop and made a series of photo with the help of my friend, which I think is also a nice try of making art. On Friday, I hosted an online sharing session for Chinese comedians in Spain for about 2.5 hours, since stand-up comedy is also a kind of performance, I think during my sharing session, I gathered my thoughts once again on how to get prepared for a performance show. On Saturday, I went to see arts dance showcase at CSM platform theatre, it contians so many different kind of dances and was really good, I also came across an alumni who basically has a map of voguing in London in her mind and she introduced me a lot of old way voguing classes, which I always wanted to try but didn’t find any ways to try before.
After a fruitful week of struggling, learning, sharing and absorbing new things, here I am to proudly present my draft towards this question:
What:
The area I intend to research is performance art, and the precise question I will be addressing is: How can performance art be more relevant to today’s living?
Why:
This topic is valuable to me because become an artist is a next level of my life journey, and performance art is the most approachable kind of art for me now, and I really want to open-up my body since I used to be an uptight person. To the world, this topic is of great value because I want to make performance art more approachable to wider audiences.
How:
To accomplish my project in practical terms, as a fresher to performance art, I will use literature review to know more about theory and history of performance art. To make my performance art come true, I must combine theory with practice, thus, I will watch many different kind performance both online and offline and go to different kinds of body movement workshops both at campus and society. I will make full use of intervention pop-up showcase to test my idea, and when there is no pop-up showcase scheduled, I will get feedback by chatting with my peers, go to office hour to chat with tutors, or interview people, or posting my work on social media, very rarely I might use questionnaires (but personally I want to avoid using questionnaire because it is usually too simple to get deeper feedback and I can barely find questionnaires interesting). And for now I want to make a closely-life-related performance art as my outcome. But my outcome might change through my process of developing my idea.
My rough schedule is:
May-Mid June: Get to know about performance art by second hand research and watch some performance shows which is highly related to body expression. Start to participate in body-related workshops.
Late June-Mid September: Try to make my performance art, directly perform it or record and play it and gain external feedback.
Late September-November: Make my performance art into series and prepare for graduation showcase festival.
What If:
I hope this project can make performance art more approachable to wider audiences. I want to break the situation of the wider audience cannot understand performance art, and find it hard to link the written introduction with the art itself. I want the art itself be more down-to-earth instead of being too high to be popular. At the end of the course, I want to position myself as an artist or a performance artist. And for my stakeholders, I hope more people can be the audience of performance art and can relate performance art more to their daily life.
Reading List:
McCarthy, K. F. (2001). The Performing Arts in a New Era. [Online] Google Books. Available at: https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=zh-CN&lr=&id=JZDcgYr0-ukC&oi=fnd&pg=PR3&dq=performance+art&ots=gIQJ7yTENV&sig=CRwU-ZICdTtCtVARSxnnvnhElpU&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false
Howell, A. (2000). The Analysis of Performance Art: A Guide to its Theory and Practice (1st ed.). London: Routledge. Available at: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315079813.
Learning Agreement:
1 Be bold and crazy, be unlimited.
2 Have faith, never let words put you down.
3 Leave sometime to explore the world, that is also an important part to contriburte to the project.
4 Spend more time to sleep, keep energetic.
Evidences:
