This week I did pop-up intervention and handed in my written proposal and being so stupid to find out in the last day that learning agreement is acutallly a prepared form to fill in, not those encouraging sentences I wrote before. But anyways, I did it! Bye-bye unit 1!
For my intervention, I did the version 4 as I planned last week and I am happy to see people are interested about it but I still didn’t have the courage to draw the whole room’s attention to do some serious performance, it is still like a conversation I explain to people what I am doing, that part can be done better.
For this week’s art journey, on Wednesday, I went to CSM Foundation show to see some artwork, some of them gave me inspiration, some of the gave me courage to dive into the new field for me which is art. On Thursday, I went to see CSM BA Fashion show, it is amazing, I was so impressed by all those creative ideas, the clothing combined with the background music and the way they chose to perform, whether by just walking or by performing, all made the clothing alive. On Friday, I went to UAL high holborn for a doctoral school launch event, not to do some academic stuff, I went to watch Vicky’s, an UAL PhD student, improv performance art show. I imagined myself at the same position, I think I still don’t have that much of courage and very smooth body expression. On Saturday, I went to my very first voguing old way dance workshop. I cannot bend my knees too low because of my previous knee injury, but I am still happy to experience the half-improv-and-anything-can-happen-without-any-judgements kind of body movements. More than that, I also had an experience of very strong sense of LGBTQIA+ community, I have a better understanding of this aspect of the world, because community can mean neibourhood in my language and I didn’t have too much understanding of this word before. On Sunday, I had an invitation of a private view of an exhibition named NOWSHOWING. I am really happy to have a private view because the artists are basically all there to guide us to watch the art piece and sharing their thoughts on the art work, which is really helpful for me. Also, I came across my alumni, PhD students I had conversations before and people from MACCC cohort, so it is also a great opportunity to establish networks. But I was too introvert to speak a word and I turned on my silent mode and walked away silently. I should be more open up to communicate with people next time.
That’s all for the week and I attached my final written proposal down below to save it as a record.
Evidences:
Written Proposal
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 related to wider audiences?
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, I want to create a series of light and life-related performance art and test it with wider audiences. 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). I will also consider testing my series of performance art with my upcoming stand-up comedy tour around Europe.
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. At the mean time, I fully understand those who love or wants to create abstract art. Those people currently are not my stakeholders.
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.