Program for Playground Open Studio

Photograph: Rachael Perry

PROGRAM FOR THE OPEN STUDIO GIVEN TO AUDIENCE
(we asked the people there to give us as much feedback as they liked - the program was just a little background of the project)

THE PLAYGROUND

Performance/Installation looking at the way adults play...
Play is escaping and imagining. No in-turned eyes on yourself. Appreciating the here and now.

To develop the performance aspects of Playground over the past two years Nancy has facilitated performers through physical theatre workshops. These sessions where about delving into the performers personal imagination and through the body exploring what play means to them. Nancy was aiming to find physicality that had a pure quality of Play.

The design of The Playground focuses on ways that objects, space, colour and costume can instil a sense of play in the participant. In its entirety, The Playground is an interactive installation. The recent development of the design element has focused on altering levels, depth of field, scale, frames/opacity and placing surprising objects together, as a way to promote imagination and play.

Music is an important element of Playground. We are fascinated by how it arouses performer and audience. We are curious about how music might assist an image. Music effects the imagination, emotions and reveals narrative meanings.

Past developments have also focused on how performers can guide audience towards taking part. But at this stage we want the audience to sit back and to observe the playful act. When the performer reveals the private is it exciting?

This open studio is the culmination of a one-week intensive development of The Playground project. It was aimed at exploring how a performer and designer can work side by side in a creative space.

OUR GOALS:

• Explore repetition through the relationship between movement and design
• To return to the basics of creating theatre; working with a set frame, creating narrative in space and designating where audience is seated.
• Performer: create 3 movement sequences that evoke Nancy’s personal sense of play.
• Designer: create 1 image (still or life) that captures play – analyse what elements are present
• Fuse the performance and design process: must incorporate the swing structure and popular music and the swing


Thanks to the Spark team, Bernard and the staff at Cubby’s, Strange Fruit, Fitzroy Town Hall, Paul Mognahan, Mark, Ben, Ness, Amy, Anita, Corey, Fraggle, Rachael and all those involved in the project so far!

PLAYGROUND OPEN STUDIO

I decided that lighting was to be the main way to affect the space. Some simple props were added. On the thurs night we had a play with lighting and the space came to life more at night – could really use the depth of field. This element made it worth using the playground. Was great to have some large structures – the swings – to create movement. And the mounds, the logs – to experiment with what you can and can’t see.

Photograph: Rachael Perry

PLAYGROUND OPEN STUDIO PROCESS 6

After the town hall, we were keen to somehow create a frame in this large outdoor space, and I ended up using 40m of black weed plastic and a staple gun to make a small, close-up space at the beginning, which was then opened up on one side to reveal the length of the playground. The trajectory of the performance then became moving from close to the audience to 5m away, to 15m away, to 30m away…. All we had to hope for was that the rain on Friday held off, which it thankfully did.

photograph: Amy Alexander

PLAYGROUND OPEN STUDIO PROCESS 5

It was much more difficult when we moved to the playground space. Part of this was we had two mornings and one full day to put something on and we didn’t have anything definite down. But also because it was outside; distractions, uncontained and messy in comparison to the theatre space. It took me a while of being in the space to have any ideas at all…..

PLAYGROUND OPEN STUDIO PROCESS 3

we were talking about animating the inanimate – to open the imagination. In Italian the word ‘anima’ means to give something soul. To breath life into something. So you can animate objects, but also a space…

PLAYGROUND OPEN STUDIO PROCESS 2

Working in the town hall was a beautiful space – so nice to have a frame again, to really limit what an audience can see. We began playing with the game that’s already set up in that space –the theatre - where an audience suspends reality and sits and watches. It satisfied our urge to find clean, succinct images. We both like clean lines, in design and movement. How to marry this with the edgy and euphoric?

PLAYGROUND OPEN STUDIO PROCESS 1

This was a 5 day intensive – 2 days in huge town hall, 3 days in playground space - between a designer and a performer

On the Ist day, we went back through all the playground stuff we have gathered over the years – text, play diaries, stimulus images, notes & images from previous developments, grant applications – and pulled out things that still resonated when we imagined Playground. These were a way to enter into doing stuff on the floor – started by trying to find gestures/movement sequences and objects/spaces inspired by our own play diaries, then put them together.

Invitation to Open Studio Session