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.

Playground design march 2007 reverse

Playground design march 2007

Here’s images of a scale model 1:50 I did of the very basic structure of the Playground I have been thinking of (minus all the smaller walls and equipment).

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…

build an old

tools are endlessly interesting. my power tool fetish extends to the old hand held...

playground development

playground development at the town hall.
performer: Nancy Sposato

how to create a space that inspires play?

Thinking about design and play - how to create a space that inspires play. It is unbelieveably subjective...so more about stimulating an audience/participant's imagination?

Play space = surprising things are put/used together
= scale is affected – small, large spaces
= levels – how are you in relation to others?
= peepholes/opacity – how much can you see/imagine?
= repetition – playfulness/absurdity in numbers ie Mexican waves

EXPLORING & DISCOVERING – expanding sensation

some words on play

play is: imagination, risk, surprise, choice, simple, articulate, learning, rehearsing, joy/beauty, incongruous, freedom, testing, contradictory, ambiguous, not innocent, has stakes, heightened, participating, adventure, trying, releases, irregular, euphoric, not malicious, perspective, unexpected, not self-conscious, not self-reflexive, present, satisfying, experimenting, showing off, excitement, mystery…

check out playground research images at http://www.flickr.com/photos/7210539@N08/

Invitation to Open Studio Session