Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Play Pins: PLAY UP
I’ll tease you.
You’ll say no when you mean
yes.
I’ll please you.
You’ll be misty,
but alive.
I’ll see you.
Your eyes and mine.
The reaching.
Play Pins: PLAY AT
Greeted, you enter a shallow room with a ceiling 2 levels high, on the walls are pictures of people playing, some obscured behind tiny sliding doors. Through a doorway, the next room is a 360 projection of an outside space (the sky, the grass, the beach) with a single chair in the centre. Another doorway and the room is getting smaller, a white space with many pens hanging, waiting for you to add your writing to the walls. As the spaces get smaller along the ramp, you pass through a sensory melange – textures and sounds – to ready you for play. The rooms end and you find yourself overlooking a large space in the round. The ramp you are on winds its way around the edge till it reaches a top centre stage where a band is playing. Along the ramp, people are climbing up and down poles/nets. Further on someone is being winched up by three people on stationary bikes. Under the centre platform are two long swings. To the side is a spiral staircase and a slide to the bottom level. There are four rooms underneath the spiral ramp, inhabited by performers – the dancing room (empty with a dress up box), the boudoire (a four-poster bed), the cardboard box (a card table and chairs) and the walk-in wardrobe (a single light globe with polaroids of people all over the walls). The centre area on the bottom level has a mound in one corner and a chequered dancing floor. There are hammocks and beanbags and old-fashioned chairs around the edges. From below you can see new people enter the space and winding around the ramp above you. You stay a while, a short performance happens in the central space. To exit you are led past the side of the swings and out into the night…
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
ECCPA
I recently presented two workshops at ECCPA 2008 (The 12th Annual Early Childhood Conference of Performing Arts). Many of the presenters were amazing. The main guest was Ciro Paduano, from Italy, who had us doing incredible body percussion pieces in minutes. We also had the pleasure of seeing and playing some of Jon Madin's home-made instruments (pictured), including the six player, bike propelled keyboard.
details
Thursday, September 04, 2008
Platform Exhibition Opening
PLAY PINS - How do you play?
The next instalment from one half of The Playground Project, this exhibition takes a look at moments of adult play through design.
Over the past few years I’ve been keeping a record of moments of play in my life, in everyday situations I see and from stories I hear from others. The more I’ve thought about the ways that adults play, the more infinite these ways seem. Childhood, games, sport, sex, laughter, fantasy, ingenuity, creativity, risk, syncopation, repetition, rehearsal…the list goes on. My aim then, has become more about igniting the imagination of individual play.
For this exhibition I chose a number of images that signify the different ways I have observed adults play. An experiment in how clothing, textiles, image and object can sit playfully. It is not just a public display of playfulness, it is a reminder to notice and enjoy those bliss bits in your day.
How do you play? Is it sensation or scenario? Solitary or surrounded? The silver lining or the lining of a jacket? Play up. Play on. Play ball.
Labels:
art,
costume,
design,
photography,
platform,
play,
play pins,
space,
the playground
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)