This is my first post on my blog. I tried to do this during the creative process but it never came naturally to me, I’d much rather tell the story once it’s done. So here is the first part:
When I began to form ideas of what I wanted to do for my piece, I decided to see what came naturally. Anytime that something popped into my head, however vague it was, I wrote it down on to a post-it note and put it on my wall.
Here are some examples:
I felt that I had the beginnings of two approaches/styles, I was either going to do something very dark or funny.
I pictured using long curtains to create a narrow passage that I would perform in. It would be a piece for one audience member at a time. They would sit at one end of the passage and wear headphones that would play voice recordings of phrases like ‘You’re in here with me’ in a loop. I wanted to play with fear by creeping out the audience member, but also create this very direct connection, one actor – one viewer.
However, I began to feel that it would be too much to perform a ten-minute piece so many times, each only for one person. I had no doubt that is was possible, I had watched performances artists such as Marina Abramovic have very long intimate connections with individuals, but I felt that this was too large of a challenge for me, a drama student. For now, I would leave the big stuff to the professionals, but I still wanted to find a way to challenge myself.
Through the collecting all my random ideas, I wrote ‘paint’ (seen above), but used colours to reveal the word ‘pain’ inside. This spoke to me, I wasn’t sure how or why, but I couldn’t help but return to this idea again and again. I’ve always loved plays, performances or stories that made me think and not left me mindlessly watching, I want a level of engagement. I like it when creators respect their audience to work out things themselves, I want the audience to work and be present. My ‘paint’ idea seemed to capture this ideal for me, there was a deeper message (although it’s in a different colour). I knew then that I wanted to create a story that had hidden pain but now needed to discover how exactly ‘paint’ was going to come into this.
I theorised that I could use paint to hide the ‘pain’. This was when I remembered someone from when I lived in Newcastle. There was a man who dresses up as Spiderman and beatboxes in the city center, he became a kind of folk hero, who everyone calls ‘Geordie Spiderman’. One day I joked to my friends that what if that really was Spiderman but that he didn’t want to be a hero and just wanted to beatbox instead. I always felt that would be a funny plot for a comic series, although now I considered incorporating that into my solo piece and create a superhero that didn’t want to be a superhero. I came up with the name ‘Super Boy’, I liked how simple it was and how you knew instantly that he was a superhero.